Reply to Benjamin

If there are differences between Benjamin's views and my own, I think it is difficult to tell from her commentary precisely where the issues are joined. Part of the difficulty stems from the fact that, without acknowledging it, Benjamin makes many points that seem to be similar to, if not the same as, points that are in my discussion. For example, she develops the idea at some length of the importance of maintaining tension between opposites. At one point, she acknowledges one contribution to this view in my paper (where I discuss the interplay of mutuality and idealization [Hoffman, 1991, p. 92]), but the reader could hardly guess from her comments alone that a good deal of my essay, perhaps the heart of it, is devoted to framing the issues in dialectical terms. When she writes, “The perception of the other as an object is not eliminated, but hopefully it is counterbalanced or modified by the perception of the other as subject,” she could have cited my paper (e.g., Hoffman, 1991, p. 98) in support of her point. When she says, “Is [the skewing of understanding] not sometimes an induced result of the other's participation?” does she really mean to imply that I have a different view? If anything, I defended the usefulness of the term “countertransference,” despite Aron's objections to it, on the grounds that it connoted the salience in the analytic situation of the responsivity of the analyst to the patient's influence without, however, denying the simultaneous influence of the analyst on the patient. Similarly, I argued that the counterpoint to the emphasis in Aron's and Greenberg's papers on the importance of overcoming resistance to exploration of the patient's perceptions of the analyst is the importance of recognizing the healthy aspect of the resistance of both participants to the emergence of the analyst as a subject (Hoffman, 1991, pp. 90-92). By not making my own elaboration of Aron's and Modell's principle of asymmetry in the analytic situation the