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In this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, editor Michael Miletic has contributed a Prologue, an Epilogue and a paper and has invited six other American psychoanalysts to address self-disclosure during psychoanalysis. The opening question is: ‘What of the analyst's thoughts, feelings, reactions and personal details are to be consciously and deliberately disclosed in order to be helpful to the patient and to the unfolding of the analytic process?’ (p. 515).
This question forces analysts to focus upon their own very specific, and even most personal, conscious and semi-conscious thoughts, feelings and reactions to their patients. It brings the relationship of analyst and patient into view as it is mirrored within the analyst's subjective reactions to the patient. It thus posits their relationship as being central, as an unfolding interactive product of their mutual ongoing reactions to one another, at the most subjective levels. And it introduces us to the currently evolving ‘intersubjective’ or ‘relational analysis’ approach, where the analyst is seen as an ‘observing participant’ who ‘co-creates the conditions of the analysis together with the patient’ as a partner and where self-disclosure is seen as essential.
The papers present a spectrum of viewpoints on this question. Hanly notes that neutrality is an important ‘ideal’ that ‘characterizes an analytic attitude essential for analytic work’, and without it self-disclosure can serve as ‘preconscious egotistical’ and ‘boundary violation’ discharges upon patients that is ‘an enactment’ of an original trauma that ‘should not occur in analysis’ (p. 553). Busch cautions that self-disclosure easily can slip into being a ‘subtle enactment of a narcissistically enhancing, authoritarian