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Homer Curtis opens the lead article in this compendium with an injunction to the contributors to participate in a mutually respectful dialogue without political or religious overtones. For the most part, his challenge is met. The result, to the potential delight of the readers, is a series of very thoughtful extensions of self theory and clarifications of the boundary between the 'classical perspective' and self psychology.
Curtis devotes himself to a critique of one of Basch's case reports. The patient was a women who felt deeply disappointed in her father for his failure to encourage her interests and to help her mourn the loss of her mother. Accusations based on similar perceptions of the analyst inevitably occurred in the treatment. This material is formulated by Basch as indicative of the actual failings of the father. Curtis questions this 'straightline' construction of the data, and offers instead his own views of how the woman's infantile attachment to her father might have contributed to her sense of rageful disappointment. He offers a familiar explanation from the classical perspective of metabolized inner experience, i.e. that repression, reaction formation and other intrapsychic defences have mediated between the unconscious wish and the manifest feeling. Curtis sets the tone for the major undercurrent of debate in this volume. The attention to the patient's subjective hurt via the analyst's empathy leads the analyst to a realm of inner experience that overlaps but does not coincide with the inner realm approached from concentration on underlying wish and affect (e.g. drive).
The proponents of each realm have mustered variants of familiar arguments. Curtis implies that the self psychologists have been imbalanced and reductionistic. He argues that the method of empathic immersion in the patient's subjective experience colludes with regressive defences and therefore inadvertently impedes the patient's autonomy. Basch counters with one of the few