You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is both an honor and a challenge to respond to the commentaries on my clinical material. Each reflects considerable thought, effort, and respect. The different theoretical approaches produced considerable departures in terms of understanding and positioning of the dream material. Although I clearly found myself resonating to those approaches more closely allied with my own, I found each of the commentaries evocative in its own right—stirring new questions and generating fresh thoughts as I reconsidered Barbara along the different lines posited.
As always, working with disembodied clinical material is no easy task. So much of importance is lost in the telling, and those outside the analysis are not privy to the ambience; the to-and-fro over time; the naunces that blossom and take shape in the material and in the interactional field; and, most especially in this example, the extensions of meaning of the dream imagery and affect that are so often a continuation of much that has gone before in the analytic process itself. Given the small window opening into Barbara's world, Adams, Ellman, Fosshage, and Levenson have ably captured certain critical features that contribute to her essence.
The commentators' portrayls of Barbara are wide-ranging—she is, variously, seen as extremely narcissistic, prone to borderline rages, grandiose and with significant ego defects suggestive of a poor prognosis, a highly traumatized woman with an unrealistic sense of her own limitations who leads an indolent life with questionable values, and a woman with a growing sense of expansiveness and possibility as she renegotiates her sense of self and self with others through good use of the analytic process. Although there is some overlap in aspects of the understandings put forth, the spin put on them differs dramatically. In many ways, this range seems to reflect the theoretical orientation of the particular commentator, so while one focuses on evolving expansiveness as positive and encouragin