Discussion: Self Psychology and Mrs. X.

The psychoanalyst as discussant of another therapist's case report finds himself in an odd position. He is expected to come up with brilliant new insights that the treating therapist failed to mention. If he is identified with some particular point of view among the mainstreams of psychoanalytic theory he is expected to convincingly demonstrate, or at least attempt to demonstrate, the superiority of his way of looking at data. He is supposed to achieve these herculean feats of psychoanalytic understanding without having access to any truly psychoanalytic data, for he is wholly dependent on somebody else's reports of what that other analytic therapist took to be data.

By definition, true psychoanalytic data are not publicly observable since they are made up of the private experiences of both analyst and analysand. Being thus dependent on the treating therapist's choices in reporting the treatment — choices that are dictated both by theory and by willingness to suffer the pains of self-disclosure — the discussant is necessarily limited to what are, at best, educated guesses. Sometimes these conjectures may be very close to what he might have concluded had he been the treating analyst; sometimes his speculations are far off the mark of what actually happened in the therapeutic enterprise being reported.