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Ideeply appreciate Slavin and Kriegman's respectful, incisive, and largely supportive discussion of my article. We are in agreement that much of what they and I have proposed complement each other. Although I would like to say more about this, limitations of space, force me to address what appear to be four areas of questions and theoretical concerns regarding my article.
Slavin and Kriegman assert that the double bind paradigm should be rooted in a “broader [theoretical] model of the human relational world and mind (that) guide our explanations of the phenomena that the language of double bind often so well describes.” It is my contention that this rooting of the double bind paradigm in a broader theoretical model is not essential or even necessarily desirable. I believe that both papers, theirs and mine, underscore the fact that impasses are often directly related to “hard spots” (McLaughlin, 1992) that emanate from loyalty to one metapsychological (explanatory) theory or another.
As Slavin and Kriegman themselves underscore, in their commentary, the double bind paradigm illustrated in my article, enables one to “achieve a way of steering a course through those wrenching moments that repeatedly challenge a therapist's sense of hope … (especially) … when theoretical loyalty fail[s] to provide adequate guidance [to] inevitable—perhaps existential—dilemma[s] that must be mutually endured and recognized in the course of fostering the patient's development.”
Of course, psychoanalytic practitioners want and need to seek out explanatory theories to “investigate the motivations (wishes, needs, drives) that push for a needed reciprocal awareness on the part of the