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Perhaps you are familiar with the sardonic Chinese “curse,” “May you live in interesting times” Psychoanalytic theory is now being forced to reorganize in the wake of a paradigm shift (Spence 1987). The assumption that the analyst can view with “presuppositionless eyes” (Stolorow 1994) a pure culture of patient-produced psychic material is in its death throes. Our confidence about what we “know” is being shaken up, even as the possibility of greater clarity is at hand.
If the analyst is no longer an objective observer of processes attributable solely to the patient, we must now revise our understanding of transference to include the analyst's contribution to its unfolding and expand our theory of countertransference to include both the analyst's contributions to it and the way in which countertransference phenomena affect the patient. Utilizing Dr. Jacobs' remarkably revealing account, I will develop some thoughts about the way in which the organization of this analyst's mind affects this patient's material and the way in which the organization of this patient's mind affects this analyst. I am going to suggest that an interplay of “organizing principles” (Atwood and Stolorow 1984; Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood 1987) between patient and analyst was shaping their relationship even before the emergence of the difficult dynamics that Dr. Jacobs so ably resolved through creative self-reflection. The term organizing principles refers to personal psychological patterns, distilled from experience, which subsequently reappear to unconsciously “organize” new experience along familiar lines. An important and intended implication that permeates my discussion is that the analyst's awareness