Reply to Dr. Stolorow

We are very grateful to Dr. Stolorow for responding to our reply to his commentary on our paper on the relationship between theory and technique because it gives us an opportunity to continue our dialogue about some important issues. Stolorow takes issue with us on several points. The two which seem to us most substantive are: (1) He rejects the implication that he is unaware of the personal determinants of his own theoretical position, and (2) that the epistemological positivist / relativist distinction cannot be usefully invoked in psychoanalytic theoretical discussions. Another issue he raises is less clear, namely: that he objects to our saving that his intersubjectivity theory gives short shrift to the concept of unconscious mental processes.

We respond as follows:

(1) If Stolorow accepts that his view of theory is particularized by his personal subjectivity, he needs to consider to what extent his reading of Freudian theory—that it is based on a view of the mind as isolated—is itself a misreading and driven by his own personal and political imperatives.

Donald Carveth (1996) comments on the contradictions evident in intersubjectivist attacks on theoretical positivism:

Although they emphasize the therapeutic importance of accurate empathic understanding of the patient's experience, Stolorow and Atwood unfortunately fail to extend this attitude to psychoanalytic colleagues of other theoretical persuasions. Even if we exempt them from

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situating their work within the ongoing dialogue that constitutes the collective psychoanalytic self, we cannot absolve them of their obligation to adopt a respectful and empathic stance toward those psychoanalytic writers to whom they do refer—like Edith Jacobson, Heinz Kohut, Roy Schafer, and Otto Kernberg—but whose work they quote out of context, caricature, and exploit as a foil against which to claim the superiority of the intersubjectivist approach [p. 47].

Freud and his followers have long been aware of the importance of the oth