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Master clinicians and thinkers with decades of experience, Hazel Ipp and Steven Stern deeply understand the complexities of our analytic relationships and space. Responding to Jeffrey Stern’s case, they’ve just presented some of their understandings with clarity and eloquence. Both are in agreement about the intersubjective nature of the analytic encounter, and each in his/her own way struggles to define and articulate the complex construction and character of that encounter. I am not going to paraphrase what they’ve said because they’ve already said it better than I ever could and I have little to add. Rather, I’m going to riff on three ideas from their talks that seem most salient to me. In doing this I can hopefully add something to their ideas.
From Hazel I draw questions. I love Hazel’s questions, and she asks oodles of them. Hazel is aware of and frustrated about the limits of what we can know from even as detailed a story as Jeffrey tells; she understands the daunting complexity and strangeness of every relationship. Her questions spring from this awareness and her skeptical curiosity about Jeffrey’s story. She is especially curious about his subjective states and wants to know about things he didn’t address. Yes, she wants to know much more about Jeffrey, about his motives and feelings at each stage of the relationship with Drum. She also wants to know about the origins of their created intersubjective space; that is, how it came to be. For example, she says,
Understanding more about the process that Jeffrey underwent in his connection with Drum would be vitally helpful in understanding more about the true depths of this empathic connection. One that had all the hallmarks of mutual influence and impact. But not one that I understood in the making. I missed the struggle. I missed the self-reckoning. I missed the ambivalence. Was there any internal wrestling with his own self states—states that may have been, in some measure, in collision?
And she asks of the un