Reply to Blechner, Lesser, and Schwartz

The commentaries by Blechner, Lesser, and Schwartz have several features in common. While caricaturing us as covert sexual ideologues, these commentators all use our clinical presentation as a platform for the vehement expression of their own sexual ideologies. They all seem to feel that it is now politically incorrect to publish a case in which the patient, during analysis, chose a heterosexual path over a homosexual (or, more accurately, a largely asexual) one. They all make statements about our patient and his analysis that are starkly at variance with the patient's own inner experience, both as reported by him and as inferred from many years of assiduous empathic inquiry into the nature of his affective experiences with men, with women, and in the transference. They all presume to diagnose aspects of our own subjective worlds—our belief systems (Lesser) and our conscious and unconscious phobias (Blechner) and “philias” (Schwartz)—without the benefit of knowing anything about our personal lives and histories and without ever having engaged in an empathic dialogue with either of us.

All three commentators seem to hold, as an ideal goal for every analysis, the fullest exploration of all possibilities for sexual expression, irrespective of whether the patient wishes to do this or not. Our view, by contrast, is that the specific goals of each analysis will be highly individualized and should be permitted to evolve organically from the unique intersubjective dialogue between a particular patient and a particular