Rejoinder: What Does the Presentation of Case Material Tell Us about What Actually Happened in an Analysis and How Does It Do This?

There are, as to be expected, major differences in the discussions by Rocha Barros, Chabert and my own (Chabert, 2013, p. 1153-62; Rocha Barros, 2013, p. 1145-52). These differences in sensibility, language, cultural background and theoretical orientation are quite familiar to the readers of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. And these differences are highly valuable for all of us as we struggle to find our way in the vibrant but confusing pluralistic psychoanalytic world of today. As we all know, our disagreements arise from numerous sources and inevitably when three colleagues from such diverse psychoanalytic cultures discuss our views about the daunting complexities of parsing the events of actual psychoanalytic treatment, we will benefit by a candid summary by each of us about difficulties we have had in understanding as well as being understood by our colleagues. We each agree in the abstract that theoretical discussions must be anchored in clinical ground. It will not come as news that it appears to be far easier for the three of us to agree about that lofty assumption than about the daunting and messy particulars about the obstacles to doing this. Ironically, there is more to fear from superficial agreements than from recognized disagreements. The cosmetic high level agreements too easily conceal the neglect of very important information about what was left out of these agreements.

For the purposes of this exchange of views perhaps the best way for me to proceed will be to discuss the possibility of our not understanding each other because of these abridgements. It would be futile to attempt to describe even the fraction of our work that seems clear without omitting important obscurities, so the three of us have made selective choices. In fact it is the omission of a better understanding of the methodology of contextualizing the associations of the patient that I have chosen to make the principal topic of my own remarks precisely because it has been