Response

Dear Sir,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to respond to Dr Poggi's comments. I agree with him that we need to recognize the necessity of the analyst's mental autonomy if we are to avoid the pitfall of assuming that all we need do as analysts is to be empathically attuned to our patients. That is certainly necessary, but as Dr Poggi and I agree, not sufficient. However, the main purpose of my paper was to explore the factors that affect the patient's mental autonomy. If I understand his comments, he feels we must revise our theories to include something like a healthy primary narcissism if we are to be able to account for anyone's mental autonomy in the presence of their objects. My understanding of primary narcissism is that it is a truly objectless mental state. Now certainly objectlessness guarantees mental autonomy from one's objects but the question seems to me to be, do we need to resort to such a concept to explain the development of a mind of one's own. Dr Poggi seems to feel that we do. I disagree.

The source of our disagreement may perhaps be understood by examining Dr Poggi's claim that I dismissed the patient's resistance to my exploration of her thinking about the agreement between her ideas and those of the author she admired, and thereby backed her into a position in which she was forced to agree with my point of view. Certainly, dismissing resistance can have this effect. But did I dismiss the resistance? As I indicate in my paper, I noted her resistance to examining the basis of her feeling that the author agreed with her, and in fact used it as the key to understanding both the dream of the previous session, and the clouded mental state she had been in over the previous weekend (p. 272). I then used this understanding as a tool for exploring her oedipal relationships. In brief, I analyzed the patient's resistance to help her understand some aspects of her mental functioning. If this is dismissing it, I am not sure what acknowledg