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This is doubtless an uncomfortable region. To explore it we must renounce the convenience of terminal truths, and never let ourselves be guided by what we may know
I began this article after I could not answer a patient's intriguing question. She had just finished reading Stolorow and Atwood's (1992) Contexts of Being and Mitchell's (1993) Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis, two esteemed works in the burgeoning literature on the relational perspective in contemporary psychoanalysis. Both works view the isolated, autonomous Cartesian self as an illusion. Treatment, in the relational perspective, is inescapably a two-person dialogue and process among two differently constituted subjectivities, who impact each other in complex and subtle ways. My patient learned a great deal from both books and was inspired by relational perspectives. But she was struck by a contradiction that neither of us had heard voiced before: namely, that cases were always written from the vantage point of only one person, the analyst, even in contemporary relationally oriented theories that stress the relational nature of treatment. Why is it, she wondered, that analytic case reports completely omit the patient's point of view except as it is viewed by someone else, the analyst?
At about the same time my patient was raising these thought-provoking questions, I was reading several works of postmodernist anthropology (e.g.,Marcus and Fischer, 1986; Wolf, 1992). Acutely aware of the “crisis of representation” (Marcus and Fischer, 1986, p. 6)