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I am grateful for these three discussions of my paper, for the elegance of Dr. Olson, the frankness of Dr. Silverman, and the thoughtfulness of Dr. Arlow.
I am intrigued by Dr. Olson's perceptive suggestion that the patient may be offering a gift to the analyst by bringing a movie that is meaningful to her into the analysis. Our difficulties, then, in responding to movie talk (and perhaps some patients' hesitation to engage in it) may have to do with the erotic connotations of giving and accepting gifts. I confess, by the way, that I experience Dr. Olson's discussion as a gift, one that I do not hesitate to accept.
Dr. Olson helps me to respond to Dr. Arlow's question about my apparently having neglected the analysis of defense in my paper. To my examples of an analyst's responding to a patient's comment with the statement or thought, “You are [defensively] changing the subject,” Dr. Olson adds another. In her example, the analyst wants to explore lateness. The patient answers her inquiry about lateness by asking about the movie Gorillas in the Mist. Dr. Olson reports: “The therapist remarked that she [the patient] was changing the subject” (p. 48). On reflection about the content of the movie, it seemed possible that the patient was offering a route, albeit somewhat indirect, to the subject, and other subjects as well, that the analyst wanted to explore.
It did not seem to me that I needed to concern myself in my paper with the importance of the analysis of defense, because hearing patients as defensive or resistant appears frequently in most samples from analysts' work I hear or read. This kind of hearing comes easily to analysts, not simply because it is always true that there is some element in what a patient says that is motivated by defense but also