Response to Commentaries

I am extremely grateful for the generosity displayed by these commentaries on my clinical vignette, my patient's dream, and our work with it. When the editors of this special project in comparative psychoanalysis asked if I would be willing to have this material used as a common point of reference, I remember a moment of trepidation. Psychoanalytic discourse is often partisan, belligerent, and sniping, and the author who presents actual clinical work regularly becomes a target. At least the presenter generally has had the last word, and, in the old days, when we believed that there was a “correct” and “exact” interpretation of clinical material, including dreams, the presenter, who knew the patient's history and life course way beyond the stark selectivity that any case presentation demands, could claim some sort of proprietary knowledge. He could then turn the tables on his ungracious commentators and assign them bad grades for being off the mark.

That this has so often been the norm makes the constructive tone of these commentaries even more impressive. Each author here has a sense that something important was going on in Andrew's treatment, in him and between us, and that we were both struggling to make the most out of his dream. But each commentator has his or her own take on this material—what he or she sees in it and would like to make out of it. Given the constructivist epistemology that makes the most sense to me these days, I certainly don't feel I have any privileged understanding of this dream and its meaning. What these different commentaries suggest to me is the deeply subjective, personal nature of each author's analytic vision as well as the common, shared (might we even use a revised sense of the term objective) understanding of what constitutes deep analytic work and transformation, whatever we might like to call it (relational, Freudian, Jungian, etc.).

Therefore, in response I would simply like to note the features of these different readings of the