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After a period of relative intellectual stagnation, North American psychoanalysis is experiencing a new vigour (Cooper, 1983). Kernberg's integration of Kleinian ideas with contemporary ego-psychology, Kohut's founding of self-psychology, growing interest in the British and French schools, rediscovery of Ferenczi and Sullivan, enrichment of psychoanalytic developmental hypotheses by infant observational research, empirical investigations regarding the process and efficacy of clinical psychoanalysis and an overall atmosphere of theoretical openmindedness mark this rejuvenation. The intersubjective critique of the ‘classical’ model's positivistic tradition is the newest arrival on this exciting scene.
In the intersubjective approach it is asserted that psychic phenomena cannot be understood in isolation from their interpersonal matrix. Far from being discrete entities within the patient's psyche, mental events are dialectically constructed experiences, specific and idiosyncratic to a particular interpersonal situation or clinical interaction. Each glimpse of a patient's psychic reality is therefore contextual. It is inevitably coloured by the analyst's subjectivity which, in turn, is open to influence by the patient's inner experience. The attempt to unmask a psychic reality of the patient that is independent of a particular analytic interaction is therefore ‘epistemologically misguided’ (Dunn, 1995, p. 724) and clinically inadequate. Countertransference is not a technical error or impediment to clinical work. It refers to the totality of the analyst's subjective reactions, which provide invaluable clues to the patient's psychic life. Even more importantly, countertransference is not merely a reaction to the patient's experience but an active constructing force of the analytic material as a whole, including the transference. Neither is the analyst a ‘blank screen’ for the patient's projections, nor is the patient a tabula rasa for the analyst's interpretive dictates. T