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The analysts who contributed to this issue can, for purposes of comparison, be divided into two groups—those who begin at a presumption of a dialectic between two equally valid forms of clinical listening response and those who begin with a single priority. On the basis the word and spirit of what they have written (and personal contact I have had with a number of these analysts), neither group would ignore the relevance of the other’s concerns; it is matter of starting point.
Henry Smith and Frank Summers both begin with an inevitable dialectic. There are two vantages from which the analyst can listen to and respond to the patient. Each is equally valuable as the other. But you can’t do both at once. And each of their articles opens the author up to the reader as to how he negotiates his listening, his response or restraint, and his sense of clinical direction.
Henry Smith sees his dilemma arising within a moment-by-moment enactment. With his patient he offers a “straightforward, even classical” (p. 528) interpretation that she both elicits and fears his analytic pursuit of her. The patient initially withdraws, but then responds, again in a straightforward manner by associating more deeply into the meaning this has for her. Yet Smith, in retrospect, recognizes that despite the ostensible neutrality and anonymity of his interpretation, he “cannot not chase her with my own words” (p. 529). And he notes that each analytic orientation, in raising its own privileged clinical stance to the status of technique, has lost sight of the analyst’s enacted participation in what emerges.
For Frank Summers, there is no mode of analytic responsiveness that does require temporary suspension of another equally legitimate (at another moment) mode of responding. He documents this dialectic between moments of more restrained listening and reflection on the transference and countertransference and moments of a shared feeling of connection. Summers states, and it bears restating, that in se