Epilogue

TAKEN AS A WHOLE, the contributions to this issue illustrate the subtlety, pervasiveness, and complexity of the challenge and opportunities presented by the problem of compliance in the analytic clinical setting. As all of our authors have noted, there is a human inevitability to the dialectical tension that exists between those forces that move toward relational cooperation and developmental completion and those that stand in the service of resistance, stasis, avoidance, self-protection, and covert gratification of forbidden desire. Levine and Feldman emphasize that this is as true for the analyst as it is for the patient. (Where they differ is that Feldman takes a somewhat more optimistic stance about the possibility of eliminating such analyst-based, countertransference interference—and in this point he is joined by at least Reed and Fogel—while Levine assumes that some degree of countertransference interference is an inevitable and irreducible aspect of the analyst's subjectivity.)

No matter what their theoretical orientation, however, each of our contributors is sensitively aware that the patient's tendency toward compliance—in its negative sense of a process impeding resistance—becomes most problematic when it elicits or is joined by the analyst's complementary needs to avoid, resist, self-protect, or achieve covert gratification of forbidden desires. Thus, Feldman's focus on the ways in which the analyst may become caught up in compliance with the patient's defensive needs (manifested as compliant behavior within the analysis), leading to a subtle and hard to recognize form of mutual enactment.

By implication, Levine emphasizes the opposite side of the coin when, following on the work of Gill, he discusses the relationship between the analyst's irreducibly suggestive presence and the tendency or pressure for the patient to comply. In his view, the analyst's behavior always reflects some degree of the analyst's defensive needs. It is the latter that form the bas