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One of the particularly felicitous outgrowths of our recent preoccupation with the intersubjective perspective (see Aron, 1996; Benjamin, 1988, 1995: Stolorow, Atwood, & Brandchaft, 1994) is a willingness by clinicians who write to open the inner sanctum of their work to readers. Not only are we welcomed into their consulting rooms; we enter the shadowy labyrinths of their countertransference to patients in compelling and intimate ways. These authors invite us near, beckoning us deep into the relational space of treatment and laying bare the vicissitudes of their affective inferiority. Such writing makes for experiential reading. Exposed so disarmingly to the range of feelings aroused in the clinician, the reader is invited to contact his or her own subjectivity, to enter the text at an affective level. The narrative becomes an intersubjective space in which the reader can muse, play with ideas and find new ways to think about his or her work.
And so it is with this evocative, beautifully realized article about Gary Jacobson's work with-to put it euphemistically-a challenging patient. Writing in the revelatory genre pioneered by Winnicott (1947) and, later, Searles (1959, 1986), Jacobson describes what it's like to be on the receiving end of a “perfect” transference-one forged in the crucible of the affective fire of a profoundly conflicted attachment.