This article highlights the analysis of the patient's experience of the analyst's subjectivity in the psychoanalytic situation. Just as psychoanalytic theory has focused on the mother exclusively as the object of the infant's needs while ignoring the subjectivity of the mother, so, too, psychoanalysis has considered the analyst only as an object while neglecting the subjectivity of the analyst as the analyst is experienced by the patient. The analyst's subjectivity is an important element in the analytic situation, and the patient's experience of the analyst's subjectivity needs to be made conscious. Patients seek to connect to their analysts, to know them, to probe beneath their professional facade, and to reach their psychic centers much in the same way that children seek to connect to and penetrate their parents’ inner worlds. The exploration of the patient's experience of the analyst's subjectivity represents one underemphasized aspect of the analysis of transference, and it is an essential aspect of a detailed and thorough explication and articulation of the therapeutic relationship. The paper explores controversies regarding the analyst's self-disclosure and countertransference.
This paper elaborates a >relational-perspectivist< view of interpretation as a complex intersubjective process that develops conjointly between patient and analyst. Interpretation is the principal process by which analysts position and reposition themselves interpersonally in relation to their patients, and in this sense interpretations contain aspects of the analyst's subjectivity that are made available for use by the patient. Inasmuch as the analyst has captured aspects of the patient's psychic life in a particular interpretation and insofar as the interpretation also expresses aspects of the analyst's subjectivity, interpretation is best thought of as the quintessential container and purveyor of intersubjectivity between patient and analyst. The paper defines two dimensions of the analytic process, symmetry-asymmetry, referring to the similarity or dissimilarity of the patient's and analyst's roles and functions in the analytic process, and mutuality-lack of mutuality, referring to how reciprocal the interaction and the experience of the interaction are. These two dimensions are used to examine the nature of the psychoanalytic process. Clinical illustrations are provided as points of departure for discussion.
An important critique has been developing that questions the ways in which psychoanalytic theories have conceptualized gender and sexuality. Contemporary (postmodern) feminist theories and the work of gay and lesbian theorists have challenged the traditional psychoanalytic view of gender as formed primarily through fixed, unitary identifications. This paper reviews the classical concept of the primal scene and the Kleinian concept of the combined parent figure and recontextualizes these ideas within contemporary relational theory. The revised metaphor of an internalized primal scene challenges traditional notions of a unitary gender identity and lends support to the postmodern critique of the notion of a core or unified identity. This paper develops the idea that we need both a notion of gender identity and a notion of gender multiplicity more broadly, we need an emphasis on people both as unified, stable, cohesive subjects and as multiple, fragmented, and different from moment to moment. In line with the postmodern emphasis on deconstructing dichotomies, the paper emphasizes the deconstruction, or rather the psychoanalysis, of such polarized concepts as male-female, masculine – feminine, heterosexual – homosexual, father – mother, genital – pregenital, oedipal – preoedipal, identity – multiplicity, paranoid-schizoid-depressive position, drive theory – relational theory, and even patient – analyst.