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Given the controversial history of the concept of confrontation, it is only natural that our five authors are all talking about somewhat different conceptions of the term. I think they can be divided into three main types: (1) confrontation as an intrinsic part of any encounter between one person and another, (2) confrontation as a specific technical maneuver, and (3) confrontation as an attitude on the part of the analyst (or the patient) based on anger, aggression, and blame. No longer does anyone seem to think of confrontation as an ordinary descriptive term, as it was used during the first half of the last century. Let us take the three types one at a time.
In terms of the first conception, Ferro and Civitarese, who ultimately settle on a somewhat different point of view, note the ubiquity of confrontation when they comment, “A wider conception, on the other hand, would tend to take account of the degree of confrontation implicit in any intervention” (p. 307). More explicitly, both LaFarge, in her beautifully self-observed clinical presentation, and I explore the presence of confrontation in all analytic dialogue and its role in the enactments that result from the encounter with another person.
Notice that highlighting the element of confrontation in all dialogue does effectively return confrontation to its original descriptive meaning. One does not need a psychoanalytic dictionary to know what is meant by the confrontation between two strangers. And that ordinariness may have some advantages in focusing the analyst and the patient on other aspects of psychoanalytic process, such as the empathic tracing of the patient’s experience, the examination of the interaction from an immersion in the enactments that result, the building of representations, or listening to the messages from the analytic field and intervening from within that field. In other words, if we refrain from collapsing the conceptualization of what we are doing into a series of simple technical devic