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I would like to begin my reply by thanking the two discussants for the in-depth study of the case presented in mypaper.
Their remarks, although they are not too far removed from the perspective which I used in the clinical reading of Anna's case, have allowed me to reflect more deeply on some aspects that I perhaps had taken too much for granted.
I completely agree with the possible reading of the case given by Sandra Buechler. Indeed, the paranoid approach is one of the characteristics with which Anna tended to build her interpersonal relationships, and in particular, the family ones. On this point I do not feel I need to dwell further.
The contributions by the two discussants contain some common arguments which I would like to give an answer to. I will dwell prevalently on the discussion by Ira Moses because it seems to me to contain more motives of interpretational controversy both on theoretical and clinical levels. The common tendency in the contributions by the two discussants seems to be that they focus almost completely on the conscious experience of the relationship and not so much on the symbolic production of the patient. In fact, in the sphere of the interpersonal school, more than one author in the last 50 years has stressed the importance of symbolic processes even in this context (see e.g. ; ; Frieda Fromm-Reich-mann, 1950). The problem does not consist in not giving value to the symbolic processes but rather in the use of them within the analytical relationship. We can therefore listen to a dream of the patient without giving him any interpretation, we can instead understand from the content of that dream exactly what the patient's experience is of his analyst. In this sense Ira Moses is right, when paraphrasing Sullivan (1) he says that the analyst is freed from being the interpreter of the patient's imagery. However, this does not mean that the patient's imagery and dreams cannot give precious information about the experiencing of the analytical situa