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Dear Sir
I am writing in response to Glen Gabbard’s paper ‘A reconsideration of objectivity in
the analyst’ (IJPA, 1997, 78: 15-26) to try again to clarify my own position. Gabbard faults me for seemingly holding a view which, however, is quite at odds with that which I have put forward.
He states that I do not move beyond the patient’s perspective to offer a different one, and suggests that I lose sight of the importance of objectivity in our work, that I seek simply to affirm conscious experience, and would bypass much of the patient’s unconscious communication. Yet, as I cited in a letter in the same issue in which Gabbard’s paper appears (Letters to the Editor; in response to ‘“Psychic reality” and reality testing’ by L. Grossman; IJPA, 78: 157-158, p. 159), I have written just the opposite:
It is not that the analyst ‘goes along’ with the patient’s view nor simply accepts it as such; rather, she uses her own view to enable her to locate the subtleties of the inner logic of the patient’s, which have not yet been clear to her. We must surely employ our view, or experience, even vigorously so, as an avenue to find the patient’s, as long as we acknowledge ours for what it is—how it seems from within our vantage point—and listen with this realization (1996, ‘Toward a definition of the term and concept of interaction: its reflection in psychoanalytic listening’, Psychoanal. Inq., 16: 5-24; p. 20).
Indeed, the clinical illustrations in my writings are offered to convey my consistent effort, drawing upon my own vantage point, with its subjective, experiential, sensory, and cognitive attributes, to try to locate the still hidden, as yet unconscious dimensions of the vantage point of my patient.
My argument is conceptual and epistemological: the need to keep clear the question, ‘from whose point of view?’ A more closely data-based, scientifically credible psychoanalytic elucidation of what has been unconsciously communicated, delineating hypothesis from evidence, would fol