From Blank Screen to Participant Observer to Co-Participant: A Review of Coparticipant Psychoanalysis: Toward a New Theory of Clinical inquiry by John Fiscalini, Ph.D. New York:  Columbia University Press, 2004,  242 pp.

It is perhaps with some nostalgia that we look back upon a time when psychoanalysis could be understood as a relatively cohesive theory and body of knowledge. Yet today, as is well known, competing psychoanalytic theories often rest on incompatible formulations regarding the unconscious, theory of mind, analytic surface, transference, and therapeutic process. Some clinicians remain tied to one theoretical model, others try to draw from multiple theories but within a relational context, and still others, drawing from Kuhn, await a paradigm shift in theory.

John Fiscalini proposes such a paradigm: coparticipant inquiry. He claims that the controversies that plague psychoanalytic praxis result from differing conceptions “of the coparticipant psychoanalytic situation and its constituent processes of dyadic interactivity and psychic subjectivity” (p. 6). Fiscalini uses the term “co-participant inquiry” in three ways to describe: (1) the facts of the clinical situation, which are then interpreted in different ways by theorists; (2) a clinical stance; and (3) a philosophical statement about personhood and human relations.

Coparticipant inquiry as a clinical situation and stance is characterized by seven principles:

1. the analytic situation is an interpersonal field where the coparticipants influence each other, jointly shaping the unique course of the treatment.

2. analytic relatedness is a dialectic between interpersonal processes (intersubjectivity) and personal processes (unique individuality), and a dynamic relation between a personal, nonrelational self and an interpersonal self.

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3. analysts and patients are treated as coanalysts, copartners.

4. analysts and patients are seen as both open to interpersonal influence and simultaneously self-determining.

5. metapsychological (interpretive) and methodological (technical) pluralism is emphasized.

6. a view of psychoanalytic process that repudiates neutrality and anonymity on the part of the analyst.