Dr. Reis's paper seems to us to embody two aims. One is to explicate the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and to demonstrate its relevance for relational psychoanalysis, especially for the work of Ogden. This goal the paper achieves admirably. The second aim involves an effort at critical and comparative scholarship, an attempt to show that only Ogden has produced a “truly” post-Cartesian psychoanalytic theory of intersubjectivity, whereas other relational thinkers, such as Benjamin and ourselves, have fallen short. In this goal the paper fails, primarily because Reis has not given the other relational theorists the careful reading he has given to Ogden, his postclassical hero.

Had Reis studied the evolution of our work as carefully as he did Ogden's, for example, he would know that he is incorrect in characterizing our theory of intersubjectivity as having “arise[n] out of self psychology.” The early germs of our intersubjective con-textualism can be found in a series of psychobiographical studies, conducted in the mid-1970s, in which we explored the personal,