ABSTRACT
This chapter applies a dialectical logic to self psychology's most central therapeutic concept-analytic empathy. Analytic freedom is always limited and relative. Bion, a theorist in the Kleinian tradition whose ideas have found limited resonance with self-psychologists, identified two kinds of necessary freedom-each associated with a different conceptual model and phase of his thinking. Surviving for Winnicott was tantamount to the safeguarding of inner freedom-specifically the freedom to be oneself in the presence of the other. Conversely, the loss of this freedom was tantamount to psychic death. Empathy alone leaves too much intersubjective territory out of view. Freedom alone opens intersubjective spaces but is too unbounded to be a sufficient therapeutic principle. In analysis, Winnicott tried to provide a holding environment that offered the patient the necessary intersubjective space within which to begin to reclaim the freedom to be oneself in the presence of the other.
