Letter to the Editors Re My Response to Geist/Nocek’s Article: Permeable Boundaries

Dear Editors, Psychoanalysis Self and Context,

I’m writing about the removal, at your insistence, of a section of my recent paper “Adrift in a Love Story Without a Psychoanalytic Rudder,” discussing the Geist/Nocek article “Permeable Boundaries.” The section that was removed referenced the impact that their article has had on other patients and supervisees of Dick Geist’s as well as on their institute. You stated to me that, “it is not the province of the Journal or the discussants of Dick and Meredith’s paper to talk about the personal impact this paper may have on those reading it.” I don’t agree.

Stolorow and Attwood rightly articulated that immaculate perception is not possible: “there is no relationship without interpretation, and there is no interpretation without relationship,” . We are always embedded in an intersubjective context. Similarly, our journal does not exist in an immaculate, pristine, research field. It is not a “scientific journal” in the same sense as some of the medical journals, for example, which focus on quantitative data. The articles in our journal are not merely interpretive of various facets of our work and theories. They are embedded in our relationships with a supportive, interacting group of colleagues who ascribe to a self-psychology perspective. Analogous to Stolorow’s and Atwood’s statement, every article in our journal exists in the context of IAPSP and its members. What we write affects each other in a variety of ways. To negate this intersubjective reality is to act as if our journal is completely separate from our community and what happens in it. As our beloved Donna Orange stated: “there is no outside. It is not possible to stand outside the system … the inner-outer distinction itself is just a profound misleading metaphor,” (Orange, , pp. 689, 690).

Below is my current version of the section you asked me to delete, so that it can be considered by our community.

Dick’s an