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Irwin Hoffman is a well-known exponent of the social constructivist view of the analytic process; that is, according to Hoffman, one in which the analytic is involved in the construction, rather than merely the discovery, of the patient's psychic reality. In his book, Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process: A Dialectical Constructivist Point of View, he explores from this perspective many (currently) widely debated aspects of the psychoanalytic treatment situation, and contrasts his findings with those of classical psychoanalysis as he understands it. This latter point of view, which he calls objectivist or positivist, he characterizes as a rationalist stance, an inttellectual belief that the psychoanalytic therapies are based on “very specific, rather narrowly defined approaches or treatments to the amelioration or cure of symptoms or to further psychological development” (p. viii). By comparison, the constructivist point of view does not understand the analyst as the uninvolved applier of defined methods to a defined reality. It sees the analyst as profoundly involved subjectively in a reality that he helps to create, and rather than turning to objective methods for “cure,” keeps a sharp eye out instead for “partially blinding emotional entanglement, for the uniqueness of each interacton, for uncertainty and ambiguity, for cultural bias, for chance, for the analyst's creativity, for the moral dimensions of choice, and for existential anxiety in the face of freedom and morality” (p. xii). The constructivist analyst understand the psychoanalysis not as working upon by the analyst of the patient's