Diverse Perspectives on Psychoanalytic Participation: Reply to Adler and Wachtel

From Adler's psychoanalytic perspective, I have gone too far; from Wachtel's, not far enough. It must be abundantly clear to the reader that Wachtel and I see eye-to-eye in fundamental respects and that my differences with Adler's position are substantial. The divergent comments of the discussants, Adler from a Freudian, and Wachtel from an interpersonalist, position, polarize several of the controversial issues facing psychoanalysis today. By comparing their positions, I hope to delineate several of the different assumptions underlying their respective psychoanalytic approaches and to show how these assumptions correspond to the outlined approach. Ultimately, I believe these views to be compatible with the very different forms of psychoanalytic participation.

I refer to the distinction between a “one-person” and a “two-person psychology.” But I do so with some concern, for it seems to me that these potentially clarifying concepts, like so many in psychoanalysis, are becoming ambiguous. Thus I first refer back to the original use of these terms by Rickman (1951), according to whom a one-person psychology was concerned with “what goes on inside one person taken in isolation…. In the language of two- and three-person psychology the ego ideal of the observer in one-person psychology is a robot” (pp. 218, 219). Rickman continued: “In Two-Person Psychology we enter the psychological region of reciprocal relationships…. It studies the relation existing