ABSTRACT
Warren Poland’s “two-person separate” perspective provides a foundation for intersubjective ego psychology and the American independent tradition. In the contemporary context of attention to the analyst and the analyst’s mind, Poland reminds us that the patient is a unique other, a private universe of experience, and that the analyst works in the service of the other. Poland’s ethical pragmatics includes three foundational principles: individuality, otherness, and outsiderness. The analytic field is a field of intersubjective engagement, but the patient comes to analysis for personal growth. The analyst’s goal is to give the patient something she can use, whether insight, understanding, interpretation, empathy, or being witnessed, as when the clinician sits with someone who is ill, dying, or has suffered abuse or loss. The analyst is a professional assistant, and the patient and the patient’s life are the priority.
Poland’s witnessing, originally describing his reaction to a young female patient’s necessary hysterectomy, provides guidance for clinicians who work with trauma and other “external” experiences and events–torture, migration, racism and discrimination, sexual or gender mistreatment, and other sociocultural, economic, and political experiences. Like Erikson, Poland brings attention to the life cycle and the cycle of generations, in his patients and in himself.
