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J.-B. Pontalis wrote: ‘[One] cannot talk about counter-transference in all truth, i.e., tell the truth about it. This statement's rigour is left undiminished by analysts’ public exercises in so-called self-analysis. Those fragments — carefully distilled, purified and displaced towards the top — how suspect their moving frankness is, and how paradoxical the statements implied.… One cannot talk about counter-transference in all truth.… If, indeed, one takes counter-transference … as the counterpart of transference … they are both the way by which what is forgotten, repressed or split can and must come out by means of another.… One cannot talk about counter-transference in truth, but with tact it can be made perceptible. Here, the word tact evokes not so much a discreet wariness as a sensitivity to a surface’ (: Frontiers in Psychoanalysis: Between the Dream and Psychic Pain. London: Hogarth, 1981).
I start with the Pontalis quotation because it comes from a psychoanalyst writing at the opposite end of the theoretical spectrum from the place where Spiegelman practises his ‘mutual process’, and yet they are both addressing the same central issues. Spiegelman's book, and indeed, his conception of ‘mutual process’ is an attempt to speak ‘in all truth’, not to distil or purify or displace, but to address himself with ‘sensitivity to a surface’ — I believe he would be able to recognize and accept Pontalis's subtle and beautiful image — ‘with tact’. The ‘surface’ which Spiegelman seeks to make perceptible to the reader is what he now describes as the ‘interactive field’, ‘field’ being a concept borrowed from both classical and quantum physics.
Spiegelman's book is the record of two interconnected journeys, his own and that of his idea of mutual process. This idea emerged with his awareness of the discomfort and dis-ease which straining to conform to a persecutory ‘analytic’ model of detachment was causing him. (‘I was exhausted by the endless efforts to maintain “analy