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The panelists have demonstrated to us that asking about the relationship is really asking several questions, each favored by one of the panelists.
Arlow takes up the question of tasks. The older analysts thought their job was to liberate bottled-up, childhood reactions. They nudged their patients toward impressive emotions, assuming that memories were waiting for discharge. Arlow questioned that easy assumption. He set himself to think harder about the evidence, gathering cognitive, empathic, and associative clues to the patient's current structures of living. He envisions a yoked pair of relationships: In one, the patient is covertly printing a drama on the analyst's sensorium. In the other relationship, the patient is critically scrutinizing the drama as the analyst reflects it to him.
Then there's that other, unsettling question: How, exactly, is the personal relationship used in treatment? Weinstein is especially interested in that question. Does the analyst use the relationship only to show that the patient is still living in the past (i.e., as transference)? Or do patient and analyst join together to invent a new sort of relationship that has healing properties all by itself? Weinstein rejects both possibilities. She thinks the analyst fits into not a new but a familiar, universal, here-and-now relationship—a relationship between a teacher and a person who wants to learn. It happens to be a lesson that can only be learned by finding how the past gives meaning to the present. But in order to teach that the teacher must also keep teaching (in different contexts) that she is a (here-and-now) teacher, and not a (there-and-then) transference figure, and to that