Coparticipant Inquiry*: Analysis as Personal Encounter

Two paradigms have dominated psychoanalytic praxis: the classical model that views the impersonal analyst as objective mirror, and the interpersonal-relational model that views the analyst as intersubjective participant-observer. A shift in psychoanalytic consciousness, however, has been taking place, giving rise to coparticipant inquiry, a third paradigm that integrates the individualistic emphasis of classical theory and the social focus of participant-observation, avoiding the reductionism of each. This new perspective, which is rooted in the radical teachings and clinical experiments of Sandor Ferenczi and the early writings of Benjamin Wolstein, presents a significantly different concept of analytic data, technique, and process, and a different perspective on the nature of analytic participation. This essay articulates the seven guiding principles of coparticipant inquiry and reviews their implications for such analytic issues as transferernce and countertransference analysis, defense analysis, the therapeutic role of immediate experience, the uses of self-disclosure, and the curative effects of the living through process. The clinical dialectics of the interpersonal and the personal dimensions of the coparticipant self are examined. The inherent mutuality, bidirectionality, psychic symmetry, egalitarianism and dyadic uniqueness of coparticipant inquiry and its implications for analytic work are examined. In all this, the unifying theme is that of psychoanalytic inquiry as a personal encounter.