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I take this opportunity to present a self psychological variation on the theme of mutual recognition, a process central to the relational paradigm. Mutual recognition in my variation focuses more on the patient's agency and choice in creating the needed analytic relationship than on the developmental achievement of the capacity for intersubjective recognition, whether conceived as originating in infancy or cohering in the analytic process. My contention is that our patients come to us with this fundamental capacity already developed and intact. That we are woven into introjective–projective worlds does not change the fundamental knowledge of our separate subjectivity and implacable difference. As support for the developmental primacy of our perception of another's subjectivity, I like to cite Dan Stern's (1985) work on maternal responsiveness and the experience of recognition in which he finds that, in order for the infant to experience the mother's attunement or affective resonance, the infant needs to “know” that the mother's response is generated out of her own idiosyncratic subjectivity—that it is not an imitative or mechanical response. A specific characteristic of this responsiveness is that it is cross-modal (i.e.,
that the mother uses a channel or form of expression different from that used by the infant).
So, what is the form of mutual recognition that I propose? The patient, well-aware that we confront them with a mind of our own, must, of her own accord, take an enormous risk to allow the analyst, with her own unpredictable subjectivity, to become a part of her subjective world. This risk is substantial in that the psychoanalytic undertaking involves the exposure of the patient's most vulnerable self to another to whom she has given a transitional power. I say transitional in that the patient both creates what she needs (and the analyst is ready to “hold”) and knows that this other is inevitably beyond her control. In other words, the patient who has be