Comments on the Topic

At the heart of the psychoanalytic endeavor, and in the eye of a theoretical storm, the patient-analyst relationship is a fitting topic to honor these anniversaries of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. As this relationship marks the intersection between theory and technique and is a hub upon which diverse theoretical approaches must converge, it is not surprising that it has more recently become the venue for the significant theoretical disputes of recent decades. Theoretical pluralism is well entrenched. Though often welcomed as an “expanding universe” of opportunity (Grinberg, 1995), disquiet over a state in which “we have schools of analysis which appear to be entirely at odds with one another” (Tuckett, 1994, p. 865), has led to a general reconsideration of our basic methods of observation and inference and thus to a refocusing on the delicate often confusing interplay of the patient-analyst relationship.

Certainly, this relationship has come under intensifying scrutiny since my graduation from this institute fourteen years ago. In particular, I think it is more accurate to say that it is the analyst's contribution, conceived of as countertransference, transference, character, style, empathy, and the enactment and actualization of these in the psychoanalytic relationship, which have become the focus of attention. The inevitable subjectivity of the analyst has been highlighted and the psychoanalytic endeavor formulated by some as an intersubjective process in which “the examination of the patient's mind is realized within a matrix of a deeply buried pair of reciprocal self inquiries” (Poland, 1993, pp. xii-xiii). Even further, as expressed by Ogden, “one can no longer simply speak of the analyst and the analysand as separate subjects who take one another as objects. In