Reply to Commentaries

In our response, we address four themes arising from the commentaries. First, we discuss the distinction between cognition and metacognition and show how to draw it within our framework. Next, we explain how metacognition differs from social cognition. The underlying mechanisms of metacognitive development are then elucidated in terms of interaction patterns. Finally, we consider measures of metacognition and suitable methods for investigating it. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Reply to Commentaries

In reply to my discussants, I take up their questions on the subjects of foolishness, the analyst's dreams, and the unnamed patient. My responses to them bring me back to my own father to ask questions that had not been asked yet about my mother's release; back to the return of my patient after years of absence, and the additional history I learned then; and back to Lacan's seminar and my Lacanian analytic training to question that approach to the treatment of madness.     

Reply to Commentaries

In my response to the commentaries, I take up Dr. Cushman's concerns about my use of the term “empathy,” grounding my use in the term's changing definitions over time. I take up Dr. Harris's concerns by elaborating on my views about the complexity of identifications and the fluidity of both subjective agency and power structures.     

Reply to Commentaries

The following response to discussions by Benjamin and by Fonagy and Target focuses on several issues raised, including linearity versus multiplicity in the assessment of developmental capacities, the complex interplay of shame and subjectivity in an intersubjective field, the notion of surrender in resolving therapeutic impasse, and some thoughts on the concept of the third, as they are exemplified in this case material.     

Reply to Commentaries

In this brief reply to commentaries from Professor Etzel Cardeña and Professor Anssi Peräkylä on my paper, I try to extend some of the themes they raise, and sketch areas for subsequent research. In particular, I focus on Peräkylä’s observation that poetic confluence may serve a range of socio-relational functions, and Cardeña’s remarks on the metaphorical dimensions of mind. My discussion is developed around a brief consideration of a case that, while retaining key features of poetic confluence, departs from the pattern described in my paper.     

Reply to Commentaries

The author examines the gendered Oedipal dynamics in Steven H. Cooper’s discussion and the notion of the “phallic collapse” in the context of recruiting a “third.” By comparison, the developmental thrust of Jody Messler Davies’s commentary is examined, specifically the idea of the various registers located in particular self-other configurations and the primacy of sensory experience in unlocking the impasse.     

Reply to Commentaries

In this reply to Adrienne Harris and Cleonie White's discussions of my article “Language and Intersubjectivity: Multiplicity in a Bilingual Treatment,” I further explore the psychodynamics of bilingualism primarily in relation to implicit communication through spoken and unspoken language(s), affect, the body and unformulated experience. I also examine the intrapsychic and relational impact of multiple early attachments and consider the emergence of my own multicultural identity formed in the context of a primary cross-racial attachment in which I first learned to speak French.     

Reply to Commentaries

Each discussant approached my paper on embedded levels of illusion from a different perspective, representing schools as diverse as those derived from Jung and Bion. It is interesting that, although my paper was not primarily about dreams or how to interpret them, but rather about the way in which multiple levels of illusion may open a potential space in treatment, each discussant centered his comments around a dream that I had reported in one of my cases. In this reply, I compare the discussants' approaches to the dream with mine. I also wonder whether the dream itself represents an embedded level of illusion within my paper. If so, it may function as a transitional space in which we may entertain different viewpoints around not only the nature of dream work, but also around questions including the nature of the mind and the therapeutic process.     

Response to Commentaries

In replying to the commentaries, I continue to explore differences between a complexity model of the mind and an intrapsychic one, and elaborate aspects of the complex negotiation process that occurred between my patient, Kerri, and me. Taking up Chefetz's notion that a “change in self-state predicts observed fluctuations in the capacity to mentalize,” I consider ways that self-states in both the patient and analyst fluctuate, influence, and reorganize the unfolding process, including the systemic capacity to mentalize.     

Reply to Commentaries

Questions of historical context resonate with an Independent view of the importance of history. The historical backgrounds of North American and British psychoanalysis are relevant. Some American analysts may be seen as belonging to the Independent tradition, and the relation between Independent analysis in Britain and Relational analysis in America needs further consideration. I ask how far Relational analysis is taking on an institutional identity, and link this to Poland's discussion of “outsiderness.” Responding to Bass's and Berman's comments on my clinical examples I discuss why I sometimes do think analysts need to ascribe meaning to a patient's material. In other instances an analyst will invite the patient more into the process by which meaning evolves between them. To move freely between these positions is central to my view of clinical technique. I express doubts about analysts asking patients for their emotional reaction to an analyst's interventions. This risks being intrusive, and may tend to keep the exchange at the conscious level of a patient's mind. The analytic relationship is an interpersonal one between real people, but the analyst needs also to remain symbolically available as an object of unconscious fantasy and projection.