Reply to the Discussions

Our childhood sages

Taught us that

There are many ways

To skin a cat

Robert Stolorow and Lewis Aron present persuasive polemical statements, both of which suggest that each knows a better way—be it a more sophisticated or more confrontational or more enactive or more interpretational, certainly a less Cartesian, way—to treat my patient J. To respond to them, I shall first describe some similarities in their theoretical positions. Then I'll reply to each critique and add a few ideas of my own.

Although they identify different origins for their ideas, both Stolorow and Aron share many theoretical assumptions, assumptions that underlie a range of thinking known as “relational” psychoanalysis. The chief of these assumptions pertains to what is going on in the therapeutic setting. Stolorow and Aron both believe in what analysts call a “two-person psychology.” The central idea here is that the analyst is as much a player in the analytic encounter as the patient, that she and the patient mutually affect each other and what happens in the consulting room. Every particularity and peculiarity of the analyst affect what happens in treatment. Such things as physical appearance, age and dress, voice quality and vocabulary, what clinical material she attends to, how she thinks, what she says, what limits she sets,