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“When this therapy is over, I want us to always be friends. This is not a fantasy or a wish. It's something I really want, that I think can really happen.” For two years Susan had been pressuring her therapist for in-the-moment, spontaneous interaction and personal self-disclosure as a requirement for a selfobject relationship. The process of this treatment highlights the struggle of analyst and patient, working within an expanding self psychological frame, to find a meeting place. The analyst is caught between an eagerness to experiment with personal engagement and a conservative professionally trained cautiousness (resonating with early organizing beliefs) that prohibits spontaneity and personal self-disclosure. The patient, naive to psychotherapy, has no interest in interpretation and will settle for nothing less than an immediate engagement that requires expression of the analyst's subjectivity.
We embed the presentation of this treatment in an exploration of the expanding nature of empathic responsiveness as we consider more fully the implications of working within a mutually interactive system. In our earlier paper (Preston and Shumsky, 2000) we discussed the bidirectionality of selfobject experience, rupture and repair, impasses, and optimal responsiveness. With this article we are entering the