Prologue

As psychoanalysts we live in a world of emerging psychoanalytic pluralism. A great diversity of evolving theories and methods of practice from neoclassical Freudian through object relations, developmental, Lacanian, relational theory, and so on, now informs us. Many obvious theoretical distinctions exist which are beyond the scope of this issue. However, there is also an increasingly apparent similarity among these schools, as the analyst is now seen as participating in the psychoanalytic process in one form or another. The ideal of the anonymous analyst has vanished, having been replaced by the analyst as participating observer, or even observing participant, who now cocreates the conditions of the analysis with the patient.

Accompanying this new conceptualization is the recognition that everything that an analyst does or says, or doesn't do or say, reveals something to the patient about himself/herself. Inadvertent self-revelation is ubiquitous. Consequently, it becomes an important analytic task to facilitate the patient's examination of his/her perceptions of, experiences of, and responses to what is revealed by the analyst.

With the new opportunities that this expansion of the analytic field provides, many new challenges also await the analyst. It becomes a matter of great importance for an analyst to decide how he/she is going to talk directly with a patient about what he/she is revealing. That is, what of the analyst's thoughts, feelings, reactions, and personal details are to be consciously and deliberately disclosed in order to be helpful to the patient and to the unfolding of the analytic process? How much do we say about ourselves, and how far do we go? When do we disclose the things that we are disclosing? What are the limits to our disclosures? How do we know which motives are being served when we talk about ourselves? Our own, or those of the patients?