Chapter 17 Reply to the Three Discussions

I believe that our attempt to illustrate the three approaches to clinical material was successful and feel very pleased with the results. I experienced each of the discussants as vigorously but respectfully critical of my work with Joanna as represented in this excerpt. The thoroughness of each participant's critique spoke to the confidence that each of them felt in the value of their ideas and the safety they felt in speaking out in this context. In preparing my own comments, I have been aware of my need to avoid thinking of the process as a form of supervision. Indeed, many people in the audience seemed to be curious to know if I had been injured or pleased by the process and whether I agreed more with one of the discussants than the others. I believe that these questions were, to some extent, based on an understandable misconception of my role in the proceedings and the confusion of the panel process with supervision. I must take some responsibility for this confusion because I did refer in my introduction to my awe at the prospect of presenting my clinical material to three of my intellectual heroes, as the “mother of all supervisions.”

Because of my own inclinations and those of others who were present, I believe it is worth emphasizing that this was not intended to be supervision because the discussants were there to represent their own perspectives and to use their extremely limited access to the case to demonstrate their own preferred theoretical approaches to what they were permitted to know. Their explicit goal was to inform the audience of the distinctive features and unique clinical advantages of selfobject theory (Ornstein), the intersubjective approach (Stolorow), and motivational systems theory (Fosshage). Implicit, of course, and