The Interpersonal Paradigm and the Degree of the Therapist's Involvement

The author became progressively aware of an important distinction between two cleavages in psychoanalytic thought which had been more or less fused in his mind. He refers to the distinction between two major cleavages in psychoanalytic thought: one cleavage is between the interpersonal paradigm and the drive discharge paradigm. The primary current Freudian position on the analyst's participation is in the prescriptive mode. To attempt to discover whether the assumption of intrinsic connections is justified would require an examination and comparison of the interpersonal and drive discharge paradigms. The difference between a psychoanalytic theory which includes theories about object relations and a psychoanalytic theory built on an interpersonal paradigm can be illustrated by the juxtaposition of the following quotations from Stone and Sullivan. An important reason that it is difficult to spell out the technical implications of the interpersonal paradigm is that the paradigm does not have unequivocal implications for technique.