With the breakdown of the hegemonic hold of ego psychology on American psychoanalysis, we have been groping for ways to describe, explain, and label a new paradigm. A variety of terms have been offered, including participant observation, social constructivism, and intersubjectivity. In this paper, I use the phrase two-person psychology to embrace all these dimensions of the new paradigm. I suggest that both the ongoing struggle to define this paradigm and the proliferation of names for it are due to the fact that any viable psychoanalytic paradigm must address issues at least at three levels of discourse: the developmental (the origin of self and object representations), the ontological (the essentials of human nature), and the epistemological (on what basis and in what ways can we claim to know anything about anyone's unconscious psychology, including our own?). Perhaps the most widely recognized part of the one-person versus two-person dichotomy is the developmental component. At the developmental level, the question at stake has been whether we interpret as if children make themselves up or as if they are largely created by their parents. Ontologically, what is ultimately at stake in the one-person versus two-person debate is the fate of the concept of resistance. Any two person psychoanalytic theory of therapy will be forced to abandon the notions that resistance is intrapsychic and that resistance is the ego's primary agenda in the psychoanalytic situation. Finally, any psychology that is >two-person< at the epistemological level will assume that conscious insight, intellectual or emotional, is an event in a dialogue, not an achievement of a lone and private mind contemplating itself.
This paper is a response to an essay by Drew Westen. The author agrees with many of Westen's arguments about problems in the psychoanalytic literature and adds that the psychoanalytic literature has always been a problem for psychoanalysis. If we think of psychoanalysis as an ongoing experiment, then its >trials< are all the analytic sessions that have been conducted. Our >literature< has never systematically drawn on those. Westen critically scrutinizes certain habits that, in his view, haunt our literature, but that we do not explicitly note or disown as conceptual contrivances we mean to get rid of, while they are often misguiding clinical thinking and practice. I suggest that a fascinating question riding below the waves of Westen's paper is why patients and analysts accept this situation. I suggest that we all treat psychoanalysis as wisdom, art, relationship, skill, and something other than the application of established scientific findings because we recognize and accept it as that kind of human activity. It is unclear if patients care whether or not their analysts are scientists, but it is clear that analysts are not optimistic about sifting the research literature and finding clear clues to more effective clinical thinking, work, or writing.