Reactions To “Observing-Participation, Mutual Enactment, And The New Classical Models” By Irwin Hirsch, Ph.D.

IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH OF HIS ARTICLE, Hirsch refers to me as having accomplished a radical reworking of the role of the analyst in the clinical dyad. When I read this description of myself, I was flooded with a warm feeling of goodwill toward Hirsch and anything he intended to say. In that mood, I read the rest of his article and formulated my response to it. In other words, the remarks that follow should be understood to come from a definite Irwin Hirsch well-wisher. I mention this observation concerning my participation as reader, in a dyad with Hirsch as author, in the spirit of his subject: Hirsch’s emphasis, after all, is on the analyst as an observing participant in dyadic relationships.

In the same vein, I can report that my sympathy toward Hirsch persisted undiminished, even when I realized that he was congratulating me on having reinvented the wheel—on having recognized for myself what analysts of the interpersonalist school had been talking about for decades. Why was I not put out to discover that Hirsch is essentially damning me with faint praise? To begin with, because I think he’s right. Obviously, parochialism is the bane of psychoanalytic discourse. During my years in training at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, I don’t think I was assigned a single article from Contemporary Psychoanalysis to read. How was I to know about Wolstein or Levenson? Had I become acquainted with their work earlier, it surely would have speeded up the development of my own thinking.

Another reason why being revealed as a Johnny-come-lately doesn’t bother me is that I’m not nearly as concerned in general as Hirsch is about priorities and citation. Hirsch takes the time to document just how much of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking was anticipated by Sullivan, Thompson, Singer, et al., and how infrequently their writings were referenced, over the years, in the North American analytic establishment