You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
THE ANALYST'S AWARENESS OF THE PROBLEM of the patient's compliance occurs at the boundary between the certainty offered by the general guidelines of one's theory and the uncertainty offered by knowledge of the limitations attendant upon membership in the human race. As Levine (this issue) underlines, the analyst's transferences unceasingly and unavoidably come into play with each patient and in each case so that awareness of the limitation of the analyst's unconscious raises questions about the analyst's motives each time, in any given treatment, the analyst invokes knowledge derived from theoretical generalization. But we can lean too far to one side. The too-unquestioned adoption of assertions that the so-called “irreducible subjectivity” (Renik, 1993) of the individual analyst makes objective knowing impossible imperils the conceptual existence of this boundary between the objective and subjective, the very boundary where compliance can be examined and observed.
The use of the concept of irreducible subjectivity to negate strivings toward objective knowledge is based on a confusion between the