Reply to Commentaries

IT IS WITH MUCH GRATITUDE TO MY COLLEAGUES THAT I WRITE THIS BRIEF reply to their commentaries on my article. My article is wide ranging in scope and provocative in spirit, and the four commentaries each extended the discussion along divergent lines, opening up what are, to my mind, many of the most significant and compelling questions facing psychoanalysis today. Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic education at their best are necessarily provocative. The word provoke in fact, has its origins in late 14th–century medicine, where it was used to mean “stimulation” of a patient; derived from the Latin provocare, it means to call forth, to challenge, to appeal, and to excite. As psychoanalysts, we do indeed stimulate and challenge our patients to become increasingly curious and engaged in an intense and extended examination of their lives. We stimulate them by thinking with them about their minds and the analytic process and by affectively engaging them in the analytic relationship. As psychoanalytic educators we, hopefully, excite our students, challenge their thinking, arouse their passion and commitment to the discipline, and bring out their own calling to practice psychoanalysis. I could not be more gratified that my article has been successful in stimulating my discussants to engage in such thoughtful, passionate, well-argued, wide-ranging, and edifying commentary and criticism. In this respect, Psychoanalytic Dialogues has been consistently provocative to our discipline from its inception.

Arnold Cooper challenges me with having radically overstated my case, and yet he himself cites relevant contemporary research that itself demonstrates that, when reviewing transcripts of sessions, even experienced psychoanalysts cannot agree on what constitutes analytic process. It seems to me that such a finding presents us with a radical challenge! Cooper is right, though, to remind us of those background beliefs that we all share, including unconscious motivation, developmental