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We are offering our readers a pair of commentaries on a book that is of particular importance. The work of Madeleine and Willy Baranger addresses a theme that has been receiving increasing attention within psychoanalytic theory and practice in recent years. It involves the evolution within psychoanalytic thinking about the extent to which psychoanalysis is a one-person psychology, a two-person psychology, or a complex combination of the two.
Does the analyst remain apart from what is taking place within and being expressed by the analysand, as a “neutral” observer who comments upon and interprets what he or she perceives to be emanating from the analysand? To what extent is the analyst a participant-observer who agrees to be assigned roles by the analysand in a drama that unfolds within the psychoanalytic situation—and in fact to allow him - or herself to be drawn into co-creating that dramatization?
If the latter situation prevails to a significant extent, just what is it that is created by the two participants in the dramatization? Is it a transference-countertransference collaboration that stages important matters from within the analysand's inner world, so that analyst and analysand can directly experience and observe what has been troubling the analysand from his or her past, en route to altering the effect that the past has been having upon the analysand's present and is threatening to have on his or her future?
If this is so, how does the analyst refrain from intruding into the unfolding drama with his or her own human problems and issues in a way that the patient's care could be compromised by contamination and