This paper examines the question of whether there has been a paradigm shift in American psychoanalysis from an objectivist (positivist) to a constructivist epistemology. It focuses on Irwin Hoffman's attempt to furnish a new technical paradigm through a radical critique of the traditional ideal of the analyst as a blank screen. A 1972 paper by Harold Searles, “The Patient as Therapist to His Analyst,” which Hoffman adduces in support of his thesis, is shown rather to offer a basis for presenting caveats against the excesses of Hoffman's technique, which have likewise been cogently described by Jay Greenberg in a recent paper in the Journal of the American Psychiatric Association.