Discussion of Discussants' Comments

Thank you to Jim Fosshage for inviting me to participate in this discussion among a diverse community of people committed to psychoanalysis. Thank you to the discussants for your thoughtful comments about the object relations theory and technique demonstrated in these sessions from my work with Ms. Ambar and for acknowledging how much easier it is to discuss analytic material than to do analytic work, to plan the mining than to be in the mine-shaft. Many of you noted the courage shown in what and how I presented it. I take that partly as a compliment and partly as a warning that this work with the nonreflective analysand does not exactly show the analyst to advantage and challenges you to comment without insisting that your way of doing things is clearly better. I need more courage for the dilemma I now face: To meet our objective of discussing theoretical positions and making them clinically relevant. I want to open the treatment to your helpful remarks, but I also want to protect myself and Ms. Ambar from comments that intrude on us. I want course correction, but I don't want to be thrown off course.

Naturally, all of you have your own point of view to express and your own theory lens through which to view the material. Instead of the dynamic system of conscious and unconscious object relations, you mention compromise formations, unconscious organizing activities, representations that have become generalized, implicit relational knowing, and self-soothing and self-enlivening functions. Some distinctions made in the use of terminology may be as confusing as they are clarifying and serve mainly to establish a school of