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SO FEW ANALYSTS ARE WILLING ANY more to defend the blank screen metaphor of the analyst's role, at least in its stark form, sans qualifications, that to attack it has become a gratuitous act, useful only as a kind of chest-beating. And yet every time one is ready to consign the issue to oblivion, one reads some new article, or hears about someone's defense of neutrality, and the tired old argument comes to life. So perhaps the distinction between those who adhere to the orthodox clinical view and those who don't retains meaning after all.
Be that as it may, it has become much less interesting to bash the blank screen metaphor than to delineate differences within the group of analysts who already accept some kind of modification of the most conservative view. Work in this area has only just begun. One of the few comparisons of this sort is by Greenberg and Mitchell (1983), who describe three solutions to the problem of how to represent interpersonal relations in psychoanalytic theory: One can, like Freud himself, along with Hartmann, Mahler, Jacobson, and Kernberg, try to change drive theory so that relational matters are accommodated, but in a way that is ultimately instinctual. Or, like Sullivan and Fairbairn, one can dispense with drive theory altogether and begin anew with interpersonal relations as the cornerstone. The third alternative is a mixed model in which relational and drive phenomena are explained separately, the kind