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.
The Wordsworthian origins of this book are made quite explicit not only in the couplet that provides its title—“That inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude”—but in the editors' avowed belief concerning the intersubjectivity of analysis. They have embraced the poet's credo of subject and object acting and reacting upon each other in “an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure.” They proceed to find an antidote, at one remove, to the deprivation and frustration they experienced in their training analyses concerning their lack of knowledge about their analysts' private experience with them. In their introduction, the editors are refreshingly candid in acknowledging how the vicissitudes of their training analyses and their complex emotional relationships with their institute motivated their desire to penetrate into the intersubjective heart of analysis. Through the medium of these provocative interviews with prominent contemporary practitioners they have achieved this aim.
Significantly, their sixteen subjects are almost exclusively “classical' clinicians who ostensibly view analysis as a one-person psychology. A subtext of this book is thus to debunk that premise, even though Hans Loewald effectively accomplished this in his theoretical work over twenty years ago. His conviction of the two-person nature of analysis is aptly summarized by his Socratic question: “Are we justified in simply equating the psychic life with the intrapsyhic?” Example after example abounds of the interviewed analysts' recognition of the intersubjective two-person nature of psychoanalysis; e.g., Jacob Arlow: “Like the creative writer, the analyst is influenced by the evocative power of the experience with other people” (p. 61). André Green on the analytic situation, quoting Sartre: “En soi, pour soi, pour autroi” (“In itself, for oneself, for someone else”) (p. 92); Leo Stone on repeat analyses: “One of the things that struck me most was how little people remember of interpretive material ….