You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I hope that in the future, publishing a wider variety of written psychoanalytic communications will seem valuable to all of us.
Our editor has taken a significant risk in publishing a paper and two discussions by authors who are all three intimately connected with one another. What potential did he seek to plumb? As I look back on my paper and consider these discussions, I am, in fact, shaken by my experience as I see it reflected in the eyes of two close friends.1 Surely it must have been a daunting task for them to have to publically reveal their actual “take” on clinical work reported by a personal colleague! But it seems that the result of Donnel Stern's risky experiment has uniquely opened me to new perceptions and understandings of Ariel, Kate, myself, and my respondents.
I find that Stern has succeeded, in vivo, in demonstrating the power of intersubjectivity to shape and reshape experience.
An interesting example of this power is embedded in the idea elaborated by both discussants, though never explicitly stated by me in the case, that my disclosure to Kate was “deliberate.” The term does appear, however, in an earlier paper (Pizer, 1997) in which I arbitrarily distinguish “deliberate disclosures” from “inadvertent” and “inescapable” ones—“de-liberate” implying the analyst's purposeful choice to convey information that might provide in a Winnicottian (Winnicott, 1969) sense, some “other-than-me substance” for the patient's use. What thoughts can I draw from the surprising realization that both Stuart and Hazel take my heart-in-mouth utterance to Kate as a deliberate act? This act, explicitly stated, is one that “I have never done before or ever wish to do again.” What blindness do my two trusted friends see in me?