Reply to Commentaries

It Is A Privilege To Have A Chance To Respond To Such Different readings of my paper. I consider it a privilege, because no journal except Psychoanalytic Dialogues provides the writer with an opportunity to receive the actual responses to one's work and to have one's very familiar work suddenly come into contact with unfamiliar responses. In this dialogical structure, which Psychoanalytic Dialogues established from its start, the journal emulates the risky and always fascinating task of the analyst when he or she puts forward what is to him or her a rather known conceptualization and receives in return an utterly unfamiliar and surprising response. These moments constitute for me one of the most exciting chances for true learning and remind me of Freud's (1919) idea of the uncanny as well as of Steven Cooper's (in press) description of the analyst as being “hell-bent” in his perilous efforts to intrude upon the patient's solitude.

Let me turn first to Jacobs's more familiar paper. Even though Jacobs thought I had misread his paper, I am very appreciative of his thoughtful response, as in his reply he elaborates in much greater detail his view of intersubjectivity and his understanding of the “highly complex phenomenon” of countertransference. Although I regret that Jacobs felt misunderstood by my reading of his paper and thinks that I have “an established point of view concerning the role of intersubjectivity in analysis and the proper use of the analyst's subjective experiences,” I value the common ground Jacobs found between our respective papers—in particular, his description of the separateness of minds as well as his critique of countertransference as a purely transcriptive instrument. Nonetheless, I would like to take exception with his view that I have an “established” view of intersubjectivity and that I seem to assume in his mind a morally regulating position as to what is “the proper use” of the analyst's subjective experiences. Instead of promulgating an e