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It is a pleasure to discuss this inspiring, instructive chapter. In the context of a very difficult case, Fosshage and Munschauer have delineated three listening/experiencing perspectives an analyst may take. They have shown how the analyst used herself creatively in all three modes in the therapy of a man who suffered from rage, could not maintain a relationship with a woman, and was controlling and resistant to treatment from the beginning.
The three types of relating the authors have described are (1) the selfobject type, in which the analyst listens and interacts in a primarily empathic way, (2) the self-with-other or intersubjective type, in which the listening/experiencing stance of the analyst is more other-centered, and (3) a caretaking mode, in which the selfobject needs of the analyst become the focus of a caretaking analysand. An overarching principle is that the analyst must be prepared to adjust to what the patient needs for psychological growth at any given time and that the patient's needs can change more than once in the course of treatment.
The authors also redefine the time-worn term enactment as “an affectively poignant (powerful) and meaningful interaction that can either be facilitating of new growth-promoting relational experience or replicating of traumatic past experience.”
In my discussion, I will try to show that the three types of listening/experiencing, so appealingly neat and seemingly clear-cut, are not so clear, and that all three modes of relating are still guided by