ABSTRACT

PAUL V ALER Y, the French poet, said that the artist of modern sensibility must spend his time trying to see what is visible-and more important, trying not to see what is invisible. 1 Philosophers, he said (and he well might have added psychoanalysts), pay a high price for striving to achieve the opposite. The greatest obstruction to the practice of psychoanalysis is the tendency to read one's own theories into the patient, to create him in one's own image. That might not be too reprehensible a goal if we could count on the validity and constancy of our own precepts; or if, as psychoanalyst Donald Spence suggests, simply creating a mutually satisfying story with the patient were enough.2