by Irwin Hirsch (USA)

The title of this collection, published by IPBooks, is of course taken from a quote from Harry Stack Sullivan (1953), for it was Sullivan’s portrayal of the analyst as a participant/observer that began to reduce the hierarchy between what had been the view of analysts as objective participants and patients as subjective participants. Indeed, also implied in most pre-Interpersonal and traditional psychoanalytic models, is a picture of the analyst as inherently less flawed than the patient, a myth also exploded by Heinrich Racker’s (1968) assertion that psychoanalysis is decidedly not a relationship between a well therapist and a sick patient. I have always assumed, or I like to think, that Sullivan’s awareness of himself as a person with a deeply troubled life history helped him recognize the inevitable existence of more emotional symmetry between analyst and patient and, as well, the inevitability that the idiosyncratic person of the analyst will always play a role in analytic interaction. For Hirsch, “more human than otherwise” has never meant that we are all alike in our emotional fingerprints, but that each unique fingerprint is characterized by unique emotions that influence all perception and all interpersonal interaction.

https://ipbooks.net/product/more-human-than-otherwise-selected-papers-by-irwin-hirsch

Irwin Hirsch is co-founder, faculty, supervisor and former director of the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis; faculty and supervisor at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and at the National Program of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP); and distinguished visiting faculty at the William Alanson White Institute. He has written over 75 articles, chapters and reviews, and serves on the Editorial Boards of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and Psychoanalytic Perspectives. His first book, Coasting in the Countertransference: Conflicts of Self-Interest between Analyst and Patient won the Goethe Award in 2008.

Irwin Hirsch, PhD
New York City
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