Letters to the Editors

Dear Editors,

Dr. Ionas Sapountzis's sensitive paper, “From the Crumbs of a Cookie: The Poetics of the Subjective in the Therapeutic Encounter” (Vol. 2, No. 2, 75-91), exceeds positively the scope of its conceptual frame. He describes therapeutic encounters, particularly the case of the damaged little boy, Tommy, that are more than a clinical dwelling in the subjective. Sapountzis describes vignettes that appear to have a holistic life of their own, subjective and objective both—events that seem to come to life of their own accord.

Like unconscious experience, emergent and unbidden as it is, arising often intrusively, sometimes without seeming rhyme or reason, only to go its own way even in the face of our efforts to flag it down, steer it to our own purpose, take control of it, the experience and interventions of Sapountzis's cases seem to illustrate that he and his patients are organically constitutive of a larger clinical context that both participants fully live by. The therapist undergoes this experience in a clinically more informed way than his patients do. The therapist is “in-tu-it-ive,” organically part of the clinical context and the clinical moment.

The concept of subjectivity hardly conveys the scope or feel of such experience. The term “subjective” connotes not only something going on within, it also implies passivity, something without self-directed activity. The implication of subjective experience is that one undergoes what one does because one is being “subjected” to some force or influence that is exterior to the self. One need only passively experience this influence. No activity is required. Furthermore, subjective experience is highly personalized. Each person undergoes his or her own subjective experience, and the quality of each such experience is both hard to describe and unknowable to another.

As elaborated in the copious contemporary literature on subjective and intersubjective experience in psychoanalysis, such experience is understood