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About three quarters of a century ago Freud noted: "It is a very remarkable thing that the Ucs. of one human being can react upon that of another, without passing through the Cs. This deserves closer investigation … but, descriptively speaking, the fact is incontestable."1 Since then we have had many studies of the analyst at work, replete with considerations of empathy, trial identification, countertransference, and intersubjectivity. But specific exposures of what unfolds inside one analyst while analyzing have been rare.
Robert Gardner is a watercolorist, concerned with capturing on paper the nuances of New England light. As an analyst, also, he is occupied with trying to capture the evanescent images of a living analysis, putting to paper glimpses of the elusive analytic landscape. To my knowledge, no one has so clearly evoked the actual process of how the analyst inquires as has Gardner in this "Portrait of the Analyst as an Inquiring Man." Gardner steps back from abstract theorizing to call into view the subtle forces that move within an analyst at work with an analysand.
The theme of analyst and analysand analyzing is central to the thesis that the pursuit of psychoanalysis is the pursuit of two self inquiries, that advances in psychoanalysis from Freud on have arisen from reciprocities of self inquiry. This monograph is not a manual on technique; rather, it is a specimen, an instance, of an analyst's self-analyzing labors in the service of a clinical analysis. What is unveiled is the mutuality in the edge-of-awareness searching of psychoanalysis.