Incommensurable worlds

Dear Sir,

In his challenging and complex article, ‘The impact of psychoanalytic theory and a two-person psychology on the empathising analyst’ (1999, Int. J. Psychoanal., 80:449-64), Wasserman aptly criticised the traditional, positivistic, one-person view of the empathic process, in which the ‘facts’ about the patient's experience discovered by the empathising analyst are believed to be uncontaminated by the analyst's subjectivity. Any such doctrine of immaculate perception—the presumption that an analyst can enter the subjective world of a patient and gaze upon the patient's experience with pure and preconceptionless eyes—denies the inherently intersubjective nature of psychoanalytic enquiry, to which the analyst's subjectivity makes an unavertable, ongoing, co-determining contribution. As a corrective to the epistemological arrogance of the traditional view of analytic empathy, Wasserman proposed an ‘integrated stance’, combining elements from both one-person and two-person psychologies.

Wasserman's proposal, however, contained its own conceptual problems and internal inconsistencies. In upholding the primacy of interpretation, for example, he wrongly equated corrective emotional experiences with non-interpretive interactions between analyst and patient, thereby perpetuating the dichotomy between insight through interpretation and relational experiences with the analyst. But the analyst's transference interpretations are not disembodied transmissions of insight about the analytic relationship; they are an inherent, inseparable component of the analytic relationship. In my view, a good interpretation is a relational process, a central constituent of which is the patient's experience of being understood. Furthermore, the mutative power of a good interpretation lies in the transference meaning of the experience of being understood, as the patient weaves that experience into the unique tapestry of mobilised developmental longings, enabling thwarted developmental proces