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The clinical provision of a “non-interpretive holding environment” described by Joyce Slochower (1991), a Relational psychoanalyst whose work is the subject of this article, has been associated by Stephen Mitchell (1988) with “developmental tilt.” Slochower (1999) notes the description of developmentally tilted frameworks as “models [that] allow the analyst to gratify the patient in the context of addressing early deprivations and tend to play out patient's and analyst's fantasies of a magical cure” (p. 710).
Yet the clinical ambience of Slochower's (1996c) holding stance presents a complex, nonmagical process that “requires that I tolerate a particularly difficult level of strain, self-doubt, and conflict about maintaining an idealized illusion of parental attunement … that renders [the patient] highly reactive to my actual failures” (p. 145), “in order for the patient to acquire a more even sense of relatedness … a complex interplay between holding and failure in holding must take place” (p. 136, emphasis added).
These descriptions mandate a reconsideration of Slochower's use of Winnicott's (1960) concept and its clinical application. This is of interest to self psychologists because Kohut's (1959) concepts of empathy and deficit (A. Ornstein and Ornstein, 2005) have been stereotyped, along with holding, as supporting such a tilt in theory and practice (see Lenoff, 2003). Following a synopsis of Slochower's work, I offer a self psychological viewpoint as a means of adding an expanded or alternative understanding of the clinical process. Although I am writing as a self psychologist, I speak only for myself. Many self psychologists, including those I cite, might take issue with the use I make of Kohut's texts, or their own. With the personal context in mind, what I hope is to provide is a sensibility of theory and practice which readers might try on for size to support or expand their capacity to work with patients.
Given the breadth of Slochower's (2004) writing on ho