The Analyst and the Significant Other: Two's Company, Three's a Crowd: Commentary on Paper by Carla Leone

Abstract

My response to Carla Leone's paper focuses on how psychoanalysts perceive the significant others of their patients is an attempt to both endorse raising this important question and to augment our thinking about it. Leone identifies the dynamic backdrop for the tendency of individual therapists to unquestionably accept their patient's representation of the significant other. From an interpersonal-relational and family systemic perspective, I raise other dynamic possibilities regarding transference and countertransference, the self as co-constructed with the significant other, introduce the importance of attachment theory, and suggest creative ways to keep a balanced view of the partner who is not known to the analyst except through the patient's representation.