Reply to Grotstein, Goldner, and Hamilton

I welcome the discussants' thoughtful and erudite comments. Each stimulates my thinking by indicating where I may not have made my position clear and encourages me to engage in a dialogue to emphasize some points of difference between us.

In response to Dr. Grotstein's elegant discussion, in my paper I did acknowledge Bion and the container function as the analyst accepts and responds to the patient's affects and subjective experiences. I did not refer to Alexander and his concept of the corrective emotional experience as, in my opinion, it is quite different from optimal provision. I remember hearing Alexander many times after he moved to Los Angeles and, in fact, had some supervision from him. Because of my high esteem for Grotstein, I reread the clinical examples in the book he cited. Emblematic is an example Alexander (1956) gives in his book. He described treating “the son of a wealthy merchant who indulged his son financially and emotionally.” Treatment began as inflation in Germany was becoming rampant, and a few weeks later the fee was decreased by inflation “to a fraction of its previous value. I neglected to adjust the fee to this radical change” (p. 95). Alexander still did not change the fee after the patient had a dream that Alexander interpreted as the patient's “guilt feelings over having his analysis for practically nothing” (p. 95). Alexander still did not change the fee. The patient quit and asked for a referral. “Instinctively,” Alexander wrote, “I thought of one experienced man who was known for being able to act quite tough and intransigent if necessary” (pp. 95-96). This was one of Alexander's early cases, yet more than 30 years later, he cites this case to demonstrate corrective emotional experience, that is, the