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In this book Irving Steingart, a psychoanalyst, takes up the complex questions facing psychoanalysis concerning analytic knowing, analytic action, and mechanisms of cure. Steingart's strategy, to create an anchor in an argument for a “modest” realism and then describe a corresponding, insight-oriented analytic relationship, usefully draws out and addresses these problems. In developing his
position, however, he occasionally resorts to prescriptive framings of the analyst's stance that appear to peremptorily evade questions he actually can answer; additionally, his discussions are sometimes less systematic than the complicated material requires. The result is a stimulating but somewhat frustrating book.
Steingart begins by affirming both the importance and plausibility of a realist epistemology and ontology to psychoanalysis. To make his case, he wisely avoids the confounding problems associated with memory validity by focusing on the immediately experienced analytic relationship. In a review of antirealist renderings of transference analysis by Gill, Schafer, and Schwaber, he shows how each believes that realism implies at least two things. First, they hold that a commitment to realism will organize and dominate the analyst's relationship to the analysand and, second, that this commitment inescapably draws the analyst into a denigrating “correction” of the analysand's distorted, “unreal” experience of the transference. Steingart replies by referring to Devitt (1984): “A philosophy of realism can be developed and maintained with due recognition of how theory-laden and risky are any of our beliefs about reality, and this is true whether our beliefs are related to immediate observations or theoretic unobservables” (p. 12). He regards “corrective” implications of this stance as adjunct to, not definitive of, our engagement with the psychic reality of the analysand.
To illustrate, he cites Schwaber's (1992) account of her work with a client who has perceived Schwaber as