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This issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry is titled “Interaction: Reflections on One- or Two-Person Psychology,” while the panel at which six of the papers herein, those by Goldberg, Greenberg, Oremland, Sandler, Schwaber, and Hurst, were presented, was titled “Toward a Definition of the Term and Concept of Interaction.” The present title seems to define the issue concerning interaction to be that of a choice between one-person and two-person models, whereas the original title does not. In fact, the subject being discussed in most of the papers was the subject of an issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry of 1988 under the title “The Intrapsychic and Interpersonal Dimensions: An Unresolved Dilemma.”
I will divide my discussion into three parts. First, I will discuss rather briefly all the papers except Goldberg's and Schwaber's in the light of the usual understanding of the term interaction, which has come to refer to the mutual influence of analyst and analysand, in contrast to the view that the analyst is an essentially emotionally uninvolved examiner of the patient's psychic reality, except for the occasional inadvertent departures from this “neutrality” and “abstinence,” which are called countertransference. Concomitantly, a greater role is given to this external influence relative to the intrapsychic in the analytic situation. Second, I will discuss at greater length the papers of Goldberg and Schwaber. I believe both of these analysts