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ANYONE WHO HAS TRIED to keep up with the psychoanalytic literature of recent years has learned, probably with a good deal of exasperation, that psychoanalytic theorizing has become enormously complex and variegated, with many different authors writing from different theoretical traditions, with different terms, about many different facets of clinical process, the nature of mind, and psychic development. It is very difficult to study or master even a small area or single line of this great complexity. Yet, if one steps back from the particularities, the variations, and the details, certain broad themes and common concerns emerge.
One of those themes has been the movement, over the past 40 years in the history of psychoanalytic ideas, from a view of mind as monadic, a separable, individual entity, to a view of mind as dyadic, emerging from and inevitably embedded within a relational field. This shift has had a major, dramatic impact on theorizing about the analytic situation, classically conceived as a neutral medium within which the mind of one person, the patient, emerged, unravelled, and gradually displayed itself. It is difficult to find this traditional model employed in its original, pristine form by any contemporary school of analytic thought, including the most classical Freudian. Even the most conservative authors now regard the analyst as having some impact on the analytic process. The blank screen, like the 8-millimeter movie projector, seems on its way to becoming an antique, and analytic neutrality and anonymity are regularly described as, at best, ideals, and at worst, illusions. The analytic process is often now generally understood to represent not simply an unfolding of the contents of the patient's mind, but an interaction between two people, each of whom brings with them their own dynamics, passions, ideas, and general subjectivity.
If all analytic schools regard the analytic process as interactive, to some extent, one might expect a high degre