Reply to Eagle and Wolitzky

I would like to express my thanks to Eagle and Wolitzky for their comments and for the time and attention they have given my book.1 Their “brief overview” of my main points was reasonably fair, and their interpretation of what I said about the therapeutic relationship (p. 98) reasonably accurate. They bring up many good, hard issues—questions concerning causality or etiology, for example—that we as clinicians are often reluctant to face. Clinicians may have many useful intuitive ideas about such issues, but it is most important to articulate them as well as possible. To Eagle and Wolitzky's many criticisms and questions, I can only reply that I am not permanently wedded to anything in my book, and I would not hesitate to rethink and revise anything I wrote. I am willing to modify or even completely revise my statement that a patient must evaluate the truth for him of an explanatory hypothesis offered, which became a special target for their criticism. On the whole, however, I had considerable difficulty replying to many of Eagle and Wolitzky's critical comments for the following reasons.

The critical approach of Eagle and Wolitzky is seriously flawed; I see three fundamental problems. The first is a lack of sensitivity to or lack of awareness of the significance of different