Discussion of Arlow and Weinstein Papers

I thought Dr. Weinstein's was a beautiful paper and I enjoyed it even more listening to it than when I had read it. I think that it addresses the question of how it is that we and our patients can talk to each other instead of past each other, a subject of several studies of Vygotsky's work by Drs. Wilson and Weinstein (1992a, b, 1996). As I was listening to Dr. Weinstein's summary of the Singer story (1996), one of the things that struck me was that it was very important that the man and the goat were together for a long period of time, withdrawn from the outside world. And, as I listened to the case history, I wondered about the importance of the impingement of the outside world on that analysis and how that impingement affected the ability of the patient and Dr. Weinstein to talk to each other instead of past each other. In particular, I found myself sort of wondering about one aspect of it, which (1) Dr. Weinstein may not want to particularly talk about, and (2) might not feel to be particularly important. Namely, what was the impact of this patient's background, particularly her racial background, on the relationship between her and her analyst and on her sense of Dr Weinstein's ability to understand her. How did this factor affect, for instance, her envy of Dr. Weinstein or her feeling of being left out of her analyst's world? How did it affect her perceptions of, her fantasies about, Dr. Weinstein loving her baby whose physical characteristics would contrast so sharply with her own?

I noticed for instance in the dream there are two references to color. There's the dull brown color of the queen and then there are the black spiders identified with children. This dream may or may not have occurred in the context of the analyst having a child. I don't know if it did, but in any case one would expect that this interracial