Three Minds Are Better Than One: Reply to Feldman and Kaplan

The contemporary quandary about the grounding of meaning has forced us to direct our investigative gaze onto ourselves as participants (as clinicians) in the therapeutic encounter as well as to preserve the more traditional focus on our patients. Moreover, the current recognition of the therapist's participant role in the therapeutic process—whether given a minimalist construal in terms of selective listening, the collecting of partial data, or the imposition of presumptive interpretive models on the patient's material; or a more full-blown construal in terms of the role of the therapist's conscious and unconscious communications in shaping the ongoing interaction between patient and therapist—has made us all aware of the epistemological, and ultimately moral, issues that dog every step of our work. In particular, how do we understand and represent the experience of the Other: in the case at hand, the life-world of our patients, their experiences, their unconscious fantasies, their concerns, their “hopes and dreads” (Mitchell, 1993). To be sure, a similar problem inheres in various social science disciplines, most notably anthropology, which has struggled quite self-consciously with the problem of representing difference (Clifford, 1988). In psychoanalysis, however, the problem becomes particularly tricky given the presumption of unconscious meanings that are not straightforwardly accessible to the patient and the task of uncovering these meanings while avoiding reductive interpretations. Moreover, just as anthropology's problem has become more urgent by the recent participation of third-world intellectuals on the academic scene, each claiming the prerogative to speak their own culture (Cesaire, 1983), analogously, the commitments of the members in various self-help/self-advocacy groups—consciousness raising, 12-step, different survivor groups—revolve around a similar insistence on having exclusive priority in representing themselves: that is, telling