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The current debate over whether insight or a new experience with the psychoanalyst is the primary mutative agent in psychoanalysis is artificially resolved by dividing the patient population along diagnostic lines. A widely held perspective (e.g., Stolorow and Lachman, 1980) is that insight via interpretation in the classical blank-screen model is appropriate for neurotic patients and that a new relationship is necessary to heal those patients who have not developed up to that level. Different sorts of new relationships are posited by various non-blank-screen or “participant” schools; some that include and others that exclude insight as also important. Most of these deviations from the blank-screen model have been developed by analysts who targeted either more seriously disturbed patients or children as their focal group (e.g., Fairbairn, 1952, 1958; M. Klein, 1957; Winnicott, 1958, 1965, 1974; Sullivan, 1953; Kohut, 1971, 1977, 1984). As Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) have suggested, this is either a strategically planned or inadvertent political move to develop a new overall theory of therapy without directly challenging the dominant Freudian model. Upon examination it is evident that these innovators work with all of their patients in their new mode and show little interest in the traditional, classical model with any of their patients. This may be so while simultaneously, in their writing, maintaining that the innovations only pertain to a delimited population of patients (e.g., Winnicott and Kohut).
There are a variety of analytic models that I shall call “participant” models. They are all based on the view that the analyst participates