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CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOANALYSIS HAS BEEN CHARACTERIZED by a growing appreciation of the impact of the analyst's subjectivity on the analytic process. The analyst is understood as a "constructionist" (Hoffman, 1991), (1992) who creates as well as discovers the meaning of what transpires in the course of the analysis. According to Mitchell (1993), human experience is fundamentally ambiguous, so that to understand something means to organize it in a particular manner. Experience is always open to multiple interpretations, interpretations that may be opposite, conflicting, and seemingly irreconcilable. As a reflection of her own subjectivity, the analyst employs her own "organizing principles" to create order out of ambiguity. According to Atwood and Stolorow (1984), the need to maintain the organization of experience is a supraordinate motivational principle. And it might be noted that analysts do not necessarily possess any single set of clear and coherent organizing principles. They possess multiple organizing principles, some conflicting and some unconscious, despite the striving to establish a unitary sense of order without internal contradiction.
In studying the analyst's contribution to the psychoanalytic situation, two primary sources of the analyst's subjectivity have been articulated: the analyst's unique personality and the analyst's theoretical orientation. When the analyst's individual personality is examined, the analyst's subjective contribution is considered to be the analyst's countertransference. Beginning with the seminal work of Racker (1968), there has been an assumption that the analyst's countertransference is a reflection of the interpersonal situation that patient and analyst have cocreated out of the unique interaction of their individual personalities. The analyst's most private and most personal experience in the analytic situation reflects some aspect of the transference/countertransference dynamic in the analytic relationship. To app