The Stranger Within and the Stranger Without: Confrontation in a Two-Person Process

In the broadest sense, the term confrontation describes an interaction in which persons are brought together to elicit truth—an encounter central to all analytic work. Within the psychoanalytic literature, the term has generally been defined according to the theoretical assumptions of classical ego psychology and has referred to an interaction in which an objective, observing analyst confronts the patient with aspects of himself that the analyst sees and the patient does not, leading the patient to see first his wish not to know and then the unknown part of himself—the stranger within. In newer, intersubjective models, confrontation continues to be an essential interaction in analytic work, but it takes a different form. As the analyst comes to know the patient, the patient’s confrontation with the analyst’s separate subjectivity—with the stranger without—leads for the patient to a confrontation with his fantasies of becoming known to another and, ultimately, to other unconscious aspects of his inner world. An extended clinical example illustrates this technical approach and its yield and points to potential problems that may be associated with it.