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Dear Sirs,
In reply to the letter ‘Psychoanalysis without Descartes’ (Stolorow, Orange & Atwood, 2001, p. 1263), a response to my paper ‘The myth and history of some psychoanalytic concepts: Thoughts inspired by a reading of Orange et al., Working Intersubjectively’ (2001, p. 1205), I should like to draw attention to the following points.
The authors write, ‘She [Goretti] even declares that it is Freud who should properly be decreed the originator of the intersubjective perspective in psychoanalysis’ (p. 1263). Actually, I was quoting a passage from a paper of Freud's (1937) where, among the factors influencing the perspectives of a psychoanalytic treatment that could make it hard going, he focuses on the individuality of the analyst. What I wrote was that Freud's words might well have laid the foundations of an intersubjective current, had the authors been interested in undertaking an operation of the kind. My discourse contained no pragmatic injunction, merely a reference to a specific mental attitude of the authors, who appear to be unaware of the significant similarities to Freud's thinking (in my text I quoted many other passages from Freud where the inevitable influence of the analyst on the course of the cure is likewise evaluated), and also to the fact that they had failed to recognise this continuity with his thought and to grant him priority where certain subjects were concerned.
The authors state that Freudian doctrine is saturated in the Cartesian conception of the isolated mind, and that this conception has resulted in profound clinical consequences. I mentioned in my paper that Freudian thought is beset by contradictions. According to Holt (1965) the capacity for tolerating contradictions is characteristic of the cognitive style of Freud himself. I need only refer to a disconcerting example of this type of contradiction in Freud's classic text ‘Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning’ (1911). After giving us a description of how the newbo