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Psychoanalysis, like other vibrant human endeavors, has from its beginning been occupied in debates about fundamental issues. A constant has been that it has improved the lives of those who have engaged in a psychoanalytic process. How and by what means it has and continues to do so have been open to active debate, and many crucial theoretical and clinical principles have evolved since the inception of psychoanalysis more than 100 years ago. Basic questions such as how many people are in the consulting room, what they are doing, the relative roles of participants, and even what constitutes a person have been open to question and have elicited radically different answers over time.
Contemplating the differences among psychoanalytic perspectives calls upon us to delve into psychoanalytic concepts of the mind, the body, and the self. A question of note in discussing Irwin Hirsch's new collection of essays, More Human Than Otherwise, is whether contemporary psychoanalytic conceptions of mind, body, and self are mere conventions, whether they are useful, and if so, which psychoanalytic conceptions go with which theoretical and clinical models, and how to optimize their usefulness for therapeutic action.
The well-charted territory of the turn of the last century's revelations concerning objectivity, truth, and reality that led to postmodern thought effected change in disciplines across the board, including that of psychoanalysis. No longer was it possible, for example, to substantively hold that objective observation is possible. Thus, it was no longer possible to maintain that the analyst in the room was a neutral reflecting surface for the analysand's distorted perception of the analyst. No matter how well an analyst has been analyzed, the analyst cannot but be in the room as a fully human being, which would include the inevitability of having countertransference reactions. Countertransference has evolved into a tool of the analyst, but not without strong objections. In f