You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dr. Furer believes that the goal of psychoanalytic inquiry has shifted: contemporary analytic thinkers are interested in understanding the treatment relationship and the analyst's participation in it instead of understanding the mind of the patient. I think Dr. Furer is right about the shift but wrong about the reason for it. Clinical analysts have become interested in study of the analyst's participation in the treatment relationship as a means of better understanding the mind of the patient. We might analogize recent developments in our field to what happened in physics ninety years ago with the introduction of Einstein's theory of special relativity—which did not represent a shift away from interest in and understanding of the structure of the atom.
Dr. Jacobs is under the impression that I minimize the distinction between enactments that aid the analytic process and those that inhibit or undermine it. Ironically, my point is that psychoanalytic theory has blurred the distinction between events that facilitate the psychoanalytic process and events that hinder it by conceptualizing enactment pejoratively and developing a theory of technique that directs the analyst to try to avoid enactment. Since enactment is an aspect of all analytic activity, it makes no sense to judge the utility of an analytic event on the basis of whether it is “an enactment,” as if it could be anything else.
I would like to make a revision of Dr. Leo Rangell's cogent summary of similarities and differences among the panelists. He says: “Renik feels it is to the patient's analytic benefit for the analyst to tell him who the real Renik is” (p. 84). Not so. I feel it is to the patient's benefit for me to tell him who I think I am, which is a crucially different matter. Making my own opinions explicit, as such, instead of keeping them covertly influential by pretending that I have