Response to Wylie

Dear Sirs,

I thank Dr Wylie for his interest and comments on my article ‘The attraction of topographical technique’ (2001, p. 671). Dr Wylie was an old teacher of mine, and for me this represents a rare opportunity to continue reflecting on his observations after many years and many miles of distance.

In my paper I tried to spell in clear terms the powerful, though irrational, motives why topographical technique continues to be so untowardly attractive. I was sorry to learn that my arguments did not persuade Dr Wylie at all on the convenience of replacing the prestructural methodology with the structural one. Neither did Dr Wylie find convincing my explanation of why I decided against giving a patient an oedipal interpretation ‘insufficiently based on explicit material’ (p. 680). I wondered in puzzlement why he thought that I missed ‘an opportunity, at this point early in the analysis, to strengthen the working alliance’, for my feeling was quite the opposite: had I given an interpretation along that line, the patient would have sensed that I was too theory driven in my views and not sensitive enough to what he actually verbalised or what he could emotionally absorb. My question ‘Where do you think these demands are coming from?’ implied an encouragement to look into the past, as Dr Wylie remarked, but I thought that it also opened the possibility of other dimensions, such as enquiry into intrapsychic conflict and search for internal meaning. Did my question remove the patient from the clinical surface? I do not think so, at least not in my rendition of clinical surface (Paniagua, 1991).

I thoroughly agree with Wylie's—and Jacobs's—suggestion that we should use our inner experiences (among many others) to grasp certain unconscious communications transmitted by analysands. However, in this regard, I would like to stress two technical points: first, I would consider it essential to go in mente over the clinical material in order to try to discern what in it could account