Letter

To the Editor:

Although Milton Eber's dominant complaint in his review (Psychoanalytic Books, 1, 250-255) of our book, Understanding Countertransference, revolves ostensibly around our extensive attention to the concept of projective identification, it is our feeling that he may be most troubled by our assertion that the patient is intimately involved in influencing the therapist either toward or away from empathic attunement. Although Eber agrees that the patient does influence the therapist's emotional state, he proposes that the manner in which this comes about should be “simply taken for granted” and that other theorists are able to discuss the patient's influence “often without giving it a name.”

Because he favors a more “parsimonious approach,” Eber criticizes our efforts to explicate “precisely and extensively” the specific components of a subtle, at times unconscious, sequence of events unfolding within the therapist. What a curious basis for disagreement! How dare we examine the characteristics of empathy and how it comes about. It is as though by attempting to demystify the empathic process, we are somehow tampering with its poetic integrity. Eber contends that an exploration of a patient's influence should be approached “without any extended discussion of the mechanisms involved.” We have produced a “methodological, schematic approach” to a subject (empathy) that, if mentioned at all, ought to remain couched in “a compelling literary quality.”

We have attempted to bring greater clarity to what Eber refers to as the “subtleties of a lived experience.” Such clarity, we believe, is achieved by exploring the patient's, as well as the therapist's role in the empathic process. Like Eber, we too appreciate those psychoanalytic writers whose style is both imaginative and evocative. But it has been our experience that all too often such contributions leave us with a variety of