Interpersonal psychoanalysis' radical façade.

Abstract

The participant-observation model initiated the relational turn, as well as the shift from modernism to postmodernism in psychoanalysis. This two-person, coparticipant conceptualization of the psychoanalytic situation moved psychoanalysis from the realm of alleged objective science toward intersubjectivity and hermeneutics. From this perspective, the analyst as subjective other is constantly engaged affectively with the patient in ways that are very often out of awareness. Analyst and patient both, for better or for worse, are believed to unwittingly influence one another. This description of the analytic dyad has led many to mistakingly conclude that interpersonal psychoanalysts advocate wittinly affective expressiveness, often in the form of deliberate self-disclosure of feelings, as part of a standard analytic stance. Upon closer examination, radical interventions are no more emblematic of interpersonal analysts than they are of analysts from most other traditions, though the interpersonalists have indeed expanded what had theretofore been a rather narrow repertoire of interventions.