ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis takes place between two people. The patient seeks to reveal themselves in their subjectivity to the analyst, albeit with potential difficulty. The analyst, for his part, participates in the analytic process, receiving and interpreting what the patient reveals and/or hides. It is debatable as to whether the analyst is committed to objectively understanding his patient’s mental functioning or whether he experiences emotional states that emerge during the encounter on a subjective level. In other words, we may ask to what extent the analyst will be objective or subjective. Here, we encounter two extreme hypotheticals: in the first, we have the ideal of the objective analyst, one who does not become involved with the patient and simply observes the material from the outside, like a cold scientist in the lab; at the other extreme, we have the analyst who eschews all objectivity and focuses on what he feels, believing this feeling to be the only reliable tool for this activity.
