You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Postmodern challenges to taken-for-granted ideas of objectivity, neutrality, truth, simple cause and effect, and reliable sequential stages of development have left psychoanalysts scrambling for solid ground. Practitioners are confused and bewildered by the myriad ways in which the complexity of the psychoanalytic situation can be understood and managed. In the vulnerability and frustration of embattled treatments and unyielding impasses, we are especially in need of guidelines to comfort us, certainties to direct us, and firm principles to reassure us. In a world devoid of “immaculate perception” (Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, 1999, p. 386), concepts such as authority, responsibility, and correct technique have lost their traditional underpinnings.
As the idea of the analyst's objectivity is relinquished, we feel the need for new concepts and a different kind of language—a language of systems and processes rather than verities and entities—in order to talk about issues such as analytic authority and responsibility. This paper is the most recent in a series in which we have been pursuing the expansion of self-psychological concepts and language in keeping with this post-Cartesian thrust (Preston and Shumsky, 2000, 2002). These papers also reflect a desire to be part of the cross-fertilization process that is taking place between self psychology/intersubjective systems theory and other relational theories.
We became intrigued with the challenge of thinking further about issues of responsibility and authority in response to recent clinical presentations by Maroda (1999) and Davies (2002). (These will be discussed later.)