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Iwant to thank Charles Spezzano for his thoughtful, fair, and generous response to my paper. While I duly noted his many complimentary remarks about the substance of my position, I especially appreciated the parallel with Jack Nicholson and was thankful that it was to his role in A Few Good Men and not The Shining!
Spezzano does two things, however, in his essay that leave the reader with the false impression that, although psychoanalysis needs me on that wall fighting for therapeutic outcome, my position tends to be intolerant of diversity, mechanical and overly categorical, and blind to the ways that the postmodernists are actually my fellow-travellers. First, he argues that all postmodernism wants is to add another kind of reasoning (i.e., reasoning poetically, imaginatively, through joint self-disclosure and the like) to my version of empiricism and hypothesis testing. Constructivist theory only informs and doesn't replace other epistemologies. He agrees with Renik that “there is nothing intrinsic in a constructivist-informed account of the analytic situation that links directly to a less empirical attitude.” The postmodernist doesn't eschew empiricism. Postmodernists simply go about their empirical business in a different way than I do, that is, by using different sources of information such as the analyst—patient dyad. Spezzano is presenting us with a kinder, gentler postmodernism.
My second objection is that Spezzano mistakenly characterizes my position in such a way as to make it seem rather mechanical and rigid. In his view, I seem to use observable data only from the patient, not the dyad, to formulate my hypotheses. My goal is to categorize interventions and patients and then link them together. I apparently insist on one kind of case write-up or clinical literature. And I try to