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Gerhardt and stinson have written a difficult and thought-provoking paper that seems to make the innocent proposal that psychoanalytic theory should be enriched by incorporating discourse-analytic notions into theory and practice. The proposal receives an interesting and sufficient theoretical justification as a way of making good the promise in the new social constructivism to give a more fleshed out characterization of the contribution of the analyst to the analytic process. But then something goes terribly wrong in the way discourse ideas are applied, that is, as universal rules regulating every patient, in every analytic dialogue, in the same way. The upshot is that, when we turn to the illustrative case study, the patient's individual way of handling the discourse situation with her analyst is seen as merely instantiating the rules and, therefore, as telling us nothing about her particular way of being in therapy or in the world.
By adopting a theory that blindfolds them to potential information about the patient's way of coping in the therapeutic dialogue, the authors are left with slim pickings when they try to interpret the case—an unweighted summary list of everything she said she felt. A most unsatisfactory interpretation results: they reassure us that, with more