ABSTRACT
Erwin Singer reflects the radical qualities of interpersonal psychoanalysis in the 1960s and 1970s. Harold Searles and Singer both make it quite clear that therapists and analysts, being more simply human than otherwise, are motivated not only by the desire to help, but also by a range of self-interests, some of which are ultimately harmful to patients. Both writers illustrate the irreducibly subjective nature of all human interaction, including psychoanalytic co-participation; and both provide evidence supporting Harry Stack Sullivan's model of participant-observation, still radical in that era, as an alternative to valorizing the analyst's objectivity. For Singer, the fiction of analytic anonymity protected analysts from recognizing that they are exposed and prevents intimacy between the analytic partners. Perhaps most harmful of all, the fiction of analytic anonymity unnecessarily pathologized and infantilized patients by creating the perception that patients are blind and insensitive to the other.
