TY - JOUR A1 - Walls, Gary B. T1 - The Talking Cure in the Cross Fire of Empiricism – The Struggle for the Hearts and Minds of Psychoanalytic Clinicians: Commentary on Papers by Lester Luborsky and Hans H. Strupp JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Vol. 14 (2004), pp. 605-634. N2 - In light of the contemporary shift away from the universalizing of the Eurocentric perspective, brought into focus with the advent of globalization, it may be useful to consider reorienting traditional psychoanalytic assumptions about human nature to those that are more appropriate to the recognition of a culturally pluralistic world. The author argues that ego psychology originated in the Western Enlightenment's emphasis on liberal individualism, which has limited its applicability across races, classes, and cultures. Relational theories, in their capacity to include the examination of the socially constructed dimensions of the analytic dyad (including race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation), offer crucial theoretical and clinical possibilities, lacking in traditional psychoanalysis, that may help analysts to address some of the important cultural sources of psychological suffering. In the relational view expressed here, the unconscious – as made manifest in everyday life and in the transference and countertransference of the analytic situation – is reformulated to include social and cultural influences. Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Walls, Gary B. T1 - The Therapist's Routine Consultations: A Necessary Window in the Treatment Frame JF - Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Vol. 14 (2004), pp. 699-705. N2 - The author notes that, overall, he and White seem to agree on many important issues that she writes about in her commentary, such as the necessity of recognizing both our shared humanity and the agency of separate, subjective selves. He argues, however, that White mischaracterizes what it means to think of the self as socially constructed, and he clarifies his views of how the concept of a socially constructed self may be related to individual differences in the same culture, and to personal agency. He responds to White's imputation that his paper implicitly prescribes a type of intervention or mandates some particular view of the Truth as a new theology, substituting a concrete environmental or social determinism for the abstract (intrapsychic) determinism that he criticizes. Finally, he responds to some interesting and insightful questions White raises about the case vignette of Mr. J that was presented in his essay. Y1 - 2004 ER -