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WHAT I WANT TO BRIEFLY DISCUSS FROM MAURICIO CORTINA'S valuable and interesting essay is the notion that objectivity can be usefully defined “as the ability to decenter from our experience and to see it from another person's perspective, not as an ahistorical, Kantian principle.” From the earliest formulation of transference distortion to the most contemporary discussion of jointly created enactments, one thing that continues to matter in psychoanalysis is the tenuous human ability to grasp what is going on in the mind of another person. This is an important ingredient of what we call reality testing, even though that aspect of the definition of reality testing is not always made explicit. In other words, a reality (external to our own minds) that matters to us clinically is, very often, the reality of other minds. Can patients (and can we) recognize that other minds exist (as, at least partially, independent subjects with agency), and can we grasp what they are doing, especially how they represent and understand our personal psychology?
If and when we do grasp another mind, we would be grasping a reality external to us, and so correctly representing in words the unconscious fantasy and emotional state of another person becomes a special instance of the usual meaning of reality testing—that is, the ability to differentiate internal from external reality. It is a special instance in the sense that the external reality we are trying to differentiate from our internal reality is the internal reality of another mind—a reality that is external to us but that, unlike what we usually mean by external reality (e.g., the Earth revolves around the sun), is not external to every mind but only to all but one mind. This last