Reply to Singer Commentary: A Commentary on Meissner (2006)

I am grateful to Dr. Singer for his interest and stringent criticism. However, in reading his commentary I had the odd feeling that I was being caustically attacked for views expressed in an article I did not write. However, perhaps the deficiency is mine in that my expression failed to achieve an adequate level of clarity and precision. I had attempted to be specific when I wrote: “I emphasize that this case, as with all analytic cases, involved a variety of complex issues that played a significant role in the overall analysis (e.g., the further ramifications of his sexual orientation and his extensive narcissism) but that I will not consider here, because my purpose here is to focus attention specifically on the time problem and a few salient related issues. In addition, one compelling emphasis in this discussion concerns the extent to which his limiting the time spent in analysis severely compromised the degree to which many of these core issues could be explored and the underlying genetic, defensive, and dynamic components successfully processed. Space does not allow extensive discussion of otherwise analytically relevant and even important other issues” (p. 620).

These other issues were in fact subject to a good deal of analytic consideration, but the fact that they are not explicitly discussed seems to have been taken as evidence that they were ignored or avoided in the analytic work. Dr. Singer does cite this statement, but rather than taking it for what it says, he reads it as evidence of my disavowal and avoidance of the issue. However, Dr. Singer may not be entirely wrong in his assumptions, because the truncation and constant interruption of the analysis because of the patient's lateness and missing prevented a more ample and informative exploration of these themes than would have otherwise been possible. The avoidance, as I would see it, however, was part and parcel of the patient's effort to limit the analytic time, and efforts to circumvent the avoidanc