ABSTRACT
Both early and subsequent interpersonal writing has reflected the first and most thorough effort, certainly in the United States, to move away from hegemonic conceptions of an endogenous drive-defense way of explaining the essences of human development, replacing this with the focus on the history of exogenous relationships with others and with culture, and the internalization of these relationships, as a more pragmatic way to understand how each individual develops into the person they have become. This innovative perspective further evolved into the view that each unique psychoanalyst also brings his personal idiosyncrasy into his work and in a parallel with interpersonal conceptions of human development, both subjective co-participants cannot help but exert unconscious influence on one another. In the context of these once radical innovations, psychoanalysis can no longer be viewed as a relationship between an objective scientist-therapist and a subjective patient, and in corollary, a relationship between a sick and distorting patient and a healthy and totally clear thinking analyst. This ethos has led to a distinct leveling of the hierarchy between patient and analyst – seen now still as an asymmetrical relationship, albeit one between two flawed subjectivities. Examination of the interaction between patient and observing-participant therapist invariably reflects parallels with ways that each patient engages in repetitive and recurring internalized patterns in extra-transference and earlier childhood relational configurations. The examinations of these repeatedly patterned modes of engagement that get lived out in the transference-countertransference matrix become a vehicle for both increased awareness of how patients unconsciously shape their lives to conform to the familiar and familial past and opening the possibility of engaging in new and hopefully internalized dimensions of being with the significant others, starting with the co-participating analyst.
