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Owing to the ongoing paradigmatic shift from positivistic to relativistic science and, now for many, to hermeneutics, we view the psychoanalytic encounter, today, as consisting of two participants, with their respective subjectivities and perspectives, interactively influencing each other in their experience of themselves and of the other. We now describe the analytic relationship as an intersubjective field (Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood, 1987), a relational field (Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983; Mitchell, 1988), a mutual influence system (Sander, 1977, 1985; Beebe, Jaffe, and Lachmann, 1992), or, more recently, a dynamic, dyadic, intersubjective system (Stolorow, 1995).
To view the analytic relationship as a complex interactive system (Fosshage, 1995a) requires a far-reaching reconceptualization of the analyst's activities of listening and responding. No longer is the analyst seen as an objective listener, but as a subjectively organizing perceiver of events. No longer is the analyst seen as a removed nonparticipant, but as an interactively influencing participant. No longer is the analyst seen