Clinical discussants as psychoanalytic readers

Psychoanalytic discussants of clinical papers face certain tasks, opportunities, and difficulties. To be willing to present and publish their analytic work for colleagues to study, analyst-authors and discussants need to expect that the other will respectfully complement his or her perspective. Discussants are encouraged to immerse themselves playfully in the affective force-field constituted between analysand and analyst within the process of the presentation. As discussants struggle to extricate themselves from this force-field, they contribute best by confining their understandings to the presentation process rather than trying to pin down the actual psychoanalytic situation. When this is done, discussants are under less pressure to inform presenters. This paper considers how discussants need to process their feeling responses to clinical papers so as to enhance rather than injure the analyst-author. This approach is illustrated with vignettes of the author's efforts as a clinical discussant to become a constructive psychoanalytic reader.