Response to the Editors

I believe that I have created confusion by cursorily describing a complex phenomenon in the transference and counter-transference experience in the analysis. As a result, the reviewers have made some far-reaching assumptions, which might be reconsidered with more information. My position is that any counter-transference experience in the analysis needs to be analyzed and may lead to understanding the patient's internal object relations better. I observed my being distracted from the material and essentially not listening over a number of months and was curious about the underlying dynamics. Since this was occurring in this analysis and not others, I assumed that I was identifying with some aspect of his internal object relations. One hypothesis was that I had introjected primitive maternal/child dynamics and I was experiencing what he had experienced as a child with his mother. The self-disclosure of my experience during his seamless free association was an honest description of my state of mind but also hopeful that it would repair a damaged therapeutic alliance. In asking him if he had experienced anything similar to my “zoning out,” I was inviting him to contemplate the experience instead of reacting to it—in other words to arrive at some symbolic representation of his experience of my zoning out. When he referred to his experience of zoning out with his mother, this confirmed my speculation, and I considered the experience as a shared transference and counter-transference phenomenon involving inter-psychic communication: a shared preconscious and unconscious communication between analyst and analysand .

I considered my self-disclosure as having re-enforced the therapeutic alliance, but also symbolically representing an inter-psychic experience and communication having its roots in my patient's internal object relations