You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I am grateful to Dr. Schwaber for her clarification. These are difficult and important epistemological issues, so I will try to elaborate on the inferences I draw about Schwaber’s
position, and how I would distinguish it from my own.
When Schwaber takes issue w
ith my view of empathy as an appreciation of what a situation would mean to the analyst in similar circumstances, and says instead that it is an attempt to apprehend what it means to the patient, ‘recognizing that this always reflects our own understanding’, I am not sure what she means; if it reflects our understanding, on what is that understanding based, if not on the analyst’s actual or imagined personal experience—i.e., a so-called ‘trial identification’? The inference I draw from this sentence is that Schwaber believes that we can somehow account for the factor of our own understanding and more or less set it aside as we consider the meaning to the patient. Renik draws a similar inference about Schwaber’s position, referring to her ‘assumption that an analyst’s personal responses can be isolated and subtracted from the rest of his or her analytic activity’ (p. 561).
Schwaber’s 1992 paper is entitled ‘Counter-tran
sference: the analyst’s retreat from the patient’s vantage point’. I do not think it is a trivial distinction between the analyst trying to appreciate and make sense of the patient’s experience, withi
n the analyst’s own largely unconscious categories of listening, and the analyst apprehending the patient’s vantage point; in my view, the latter is impossible. I see the analytic process as a dialogue between two distinct vantage points that eventuates in both parties expanding their self-perceptions.
Cordially,
Lee Grossman
November 1996