Epilogue

F. Scott Fitzgerald is reported to have described America as a place where there are no second acts. You have been present to enjoy our second act. In terms of metapsychology, both sets of essays on How the Analyst's Work Shapes the Analyst have attested not to radical alternatives to practice based on classical psychoanalytic theory but to a theory of accommodations to it. We have assimilated lessons from past teachers, such as from Hans Loewald (1986):

Transference and countertransference may become indistinguishable: in pronounced instances we are no longer dealing with “significant others” and their transference and our countertransference, but the two would-be individuals become enmeshed in a psychic force field with no boundaries [p. 285].

Moving into the midphase, in terms of theory development, few would now object to Loewald's closing remarks:

On the analyst's side, his responsiveness to each patient is a new rendition, shaped by the patient's transference, of his specially trained ability to use his own love—hate in the service of analyzing. Observing and understanding the patient analytically and conveying this understanding to him by interpretive interventions, is the analyst's enactment of his caring for another person [p. 286].

What we see now is a two-person psychology, still focused one one analysis, wherein, as in infant development, the self-as-given evolves through becoming attuned to its significant others and through eliciting reciprocal attunements. In the psychoanalytic situation, self and other intermix, blend properties, coalesce, retool, and reestablish their separate domains. The medium is the harmonious/disharmonious mixup; the countertransference-transference/counteridentification field; and the enactments, embroilments, and oscillations that define