Toward a Definition of the Term and Concept of Interaction: Its Reflection in Analytic Listening

I believe that there is a fundamental conceptual difficulty in the clinical term interaction. The Concordance (Guttman, 1984) indicates that in the Standard Edition Freud's use refers just to the interaction between different psychical agencies. It is not listed in Moore and Fine's Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (1990) nor in Laplanche and Pontalis's The Language of Psycho-Analysis (1973). Nonetheless, it speaks to a phenomenon between analyst and analysand central to our understanding of the analytic process and intrinsic to what ensues within it—a term with which we need to grapple. It is a truism—we participate in that which we also observe. And we can note that this observation itself is integral to our interaction. This participant-observer view has been increasingly recognized and explicated, particularly with the shift away from a blank screen model of the analytic exchange. It has more regularly entered the “mainstream” literature associated with the “traditional,” or ego-psychological, view (Boesky, 1990; Gill, 1982; Renik, 1993; Schwaber, 1981, 1983, 1992a, b) while it had, to be sure, been addressed for some time longer, in the work of analysts influenced by