Response to Commentaries

We appreciate the thoughtful consideration our colleagues have given the somewhat new and unfamiliar directions taken in our paper. From varied perspectives, their commentaries raise numerous points for further dialogue regarding the fundamental assumptions underlying a view that privileges the implicit process between analyst and patient. While it is tempting to engage in dialogue concerning all the points raised, we will confine our closing comments to those we consider most salient and crucial to the theoretical framework we are proposing.

First, we should brief ly clarify that we do not view sloppiness per se as the “something more than interpretation” that leads to change. Rather, we describe sloppiness as an inescapable feature of therapeutic exchanges (at the local level) that is used in the service of co-creating new ways of fitting together. Sloppiness encompasses the spontaneous, improvisational, unexpected interpersonal events that “pop up” in interaction and then can be captured to catalyze intersubjective moments of meeting and bring about change. House and Portuges translate sloppiness and fuzzy intentionalizing into “the complexity and difficulty of communication between two people,” whereas we find that the two concepts move us toward elucidating this very “difficulty.”

We will begin by addressing Litowitz's elegant description of the psychoanalytic endeavor from the point of view of semiotics, because we find our viewpoint both closely aligned with hers regarding the social origins of meaning, yet deeply divergent from hers, as well as from that offered by House and Portuges, in our view of the processes that give rise to such meanings.

We find many points of agreement with Litowitz in her description of the process of communication as co-created, as needing constant