Alone Yet Connected*: Response To The Discussion

The Seven Commentators, all highly accomplished and respected, are generous in their reactions both to the idiosyncratic Wolstein1 and to my interviewing skills. Though I am grateful for the latter, I am disturbed by a number of instances of my not following a theme to a deeper place. Nowhere is this more striking than in the very beginning of the interview, where I remarkably avoid further inquiry into Wolstein's comments on love between analyst and patient. I was horrified when I read this, and dwelling on it has led to some relevant thoughts about Wolstein. For one, this is not the way he would have conducted an inquiry (using Wolstein's term). As an interviewer, I had an agenda, and I was concerned that some of my key preformulated questions would not be addressed. The actual unedited interview had already gone on for some time in what is the beginning of this strongly edited version. I was being linear and orderly, frightened of the potential chaos that would divert my list of “necessary” themes from clear explication. According to Wilner (and Wolstein himself), Wolstein preferred mutual disorder and was antagonistic to efforts at organizing experience to make it coherent. He considered the latter form to be adaptive and likely to produce material that was conformingly rational, yet not true to one's private being. Throughout the interview, Wolstein kept telling me that