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I am very glad to be here today and to have the opportunity to share with you some reflections on a topic in which there has been a great deal of interest of late. the mind of the analyst and the role that it plays in the analytic situation The title of this symposium suggests what many of us feel today—that the burgeoning literature on such matters as countertransference, enactments, the psychology of the analyst, intersubjectivity, and self analysis, as valuable as it has been in opening up new perspectives on the analytic process, has also led to a good teal of confusion and uncertainty.
What is the relationship between the inner experiences of the analyst and the patient's material? How are these experiences related to our traditional notion of transference and countertransference? What, actually, is involved in the entity that we call self-analysis? Is the process truly comparable to what takes place in the two-person analytic situation? If not, what transpires in self-analysis and how does one's self-analytic efforts produce change in the analyst?
The current literature, moreover, raises even more vexing questions. Are all of the analyst's interventions—in fact all that he or she does in sessions—basically subjective; that is, rooted in his or her psychology? If so, is there little scientific aspect to our work, little objective understanding of the patient's material? And if, as Renik (1993) and others maintain, our inevitable subjectivity leads to inevitable enactments that become the primary focus of analytic work, must we recast our view of the analytic process? Should we see it as one of action and reaction followed by mutual efforts at understanding the transactions that have taken place, rather than in our