The Analyst's Subjectivity—How It Can Illuminate the Analysand's Experience: Commentary on Susan H. Sands's Paper

The objective that Dr. Sands sets for herself in her stimulating paper is to use the experience-near lens of self psychol ogy to illuminate certain aspects of projective identification that self psychology theory has hitherto obscured—what she has elsewhere (Sands, 1995) termed “these more neglected or shunned aspects of the countertransference field.”

One of the great problems about addressing these issues is that there is considerable disagreement about how the terms countertransference and projective identification should be defined; in addition, these terms are frequently used synonymously, or, as I would prefer to put it, they are confused and confounded with one another, as well as with the idea of empathy. Sands, unfortunately but inevitably, inherits these difficulties from both traditional psychoanalysis and self-psychology. I agree with her that it is important to attempt to bring clarity to this situation from a self psychological perspective. I believe that we can do so by thinking about empathy, countertransference, and projective identification—which are central to the issues that Sands addresses in her paper—as aspects of the analyst's subjectivity. Then we can consider what determines it, what it may tell us about the patient, and whether, at any moment, it is a facilitator or disruptor of the therapeutic process.