More Human than Otherwise: Selected Papers by Irwin Hirsch
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From Irwin Hirsch’s Introduction:
Of course, my title is taken as part of 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 me, “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
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