"Speak to me as to thy thinkings" commentary on 'Interpersonal psychoanalysis' radical façade" by Irwin Hirsch.

Abstract

This article has two purposes. First, a rebuttal to those writers, including Irwin Hirsch, who criticize the current emphasis by relational analysts on the value of affective openness and affective honesty, particularly with regard to their use of clinical vignettes that vividly portray the analyst's use of self-revelation--as if these illustrations were revealing an endorsement of a naive and mindless invasion of the patient's psyche. The second, and perhaps more important purpose, is to illuminate something I feel is obscured by Hirsch's framing the topic of the analyst's "spontaneity" in the context of analytic politics--that an analyst's self-revelation in language is increasingly understood to be not simply "allowable," but a necessary part of the clinical process. Language does not make it less spontaneous nor part of what Hirsch calls a "standardized technique." Its most powerful therapeutic contribution is in facilitating linguistic symbolization of dissociated, enacted, subsymbolic experience that is immune to self-reflective cognition, immune to internal conflict, and thereby unavailable to interpretation until it becomes relationally accessible to language and thought. Both neuroscience and cognitive research support the need for a revised theory of therapeutic action consistent with the growing recognition of the human mind as a nonlinear, self-organizing dynamic system-a system in which normal maturation as well as therapeutic repair depends, developmentally, on an ineffable coming together of two minds in an unpredictable way. From this vantage point, the analyst's self-revelation contributes to the coconstruction of an alive intersubjective space through an ongoing process of engagement between two subjectivities, making the analyst's subjective openness as potentially negotiable as any other aspect of the patient/analyst relationship, rather than an unrepairable "intrusion" into a self-contained psyche.