For Fromm, the concept of observant participation reflects his emphasis on the curative importance of the analyst’s authentic, spontaneous, and immediate expe- riential participation in the analytic setting. Fromm asserts, for example, that Sullivan . . . thought that the analyst must not have the attitude of a detached observer, but of a “participant observer,” thus trying to transcend the ortho- dox idea of the detachment of the analyst. In my own view, Sullivan may not have gone far enough, and one might prefer the definition of the analyst’s role as that of an “observant participant,” rather than that of a participant observer. But even the expression “participant” does not quite express what is meant here to “participate” is still to be outside. The knowledge of another person requires being inside of him, to be him. The analyst under- stands the patient only inasmuch as he experiences in himself all that the patient experiences otherwise he will have only intellectual knowledge about the patient, but will never really know what the patient experiences, nor will he be able to convey to him that he shares and understands his (the patient’s) experience. In this productive relatedness between analyst and patient, in the act of being fully engaged with the patient, in being fully open and responsive to him, in being soaked with him, as it were, in this center- to-center relatedness, lies one of the essential conditions for psychoanalytic understanding and cure. (Fromm, Suzuki, and DeMartino 1960, p. 112) Fromm expresses his coparticipant sensibility in the following statement of the bidirectionality of the analytic process. The analyst analyzes the patient, but the patient also analyzes the analyst, because the analyst, by sharing the unconscious of his patient, cannot help clarifying his own unconscious. Hence the analyst not only cures the patient, but is also cured by him. He not only understands the patient, but eventually the patient understands him. When this stage is reached, solidarity and com- munion are reached. (p. 112) Though Hirsch leans toward a coparticipant sensibility in his theorizing, he uses the term “observing participant” in a very different sense from Fromm. Hirsch divides interpersonal and relational analysts into those who practice “participant” analysis and who emphasize therapeutic relational factors and those who empha- size the importance of interpretive (formulative) understanding of patients’ con- flicted attempts to reenact their childhood traumas with the analyst. The patient, from this perspective, is seen as unconsciously pressuring the analyst to repeat his- torically problematic interactions in the transference-countertransference matrix. According to Hirsch, analysts are inevitably drawn into playing out some signifi- cant role in their patients’ neurotic dramas. The “transformed” analyst struggles to gain awareness of his or her participation, to free himself or herself from the induced role. Once the analyst understands “what is going on,” he or she pulls him- self or herself out of this neurotic replay and, most important, interprets (or more accurately, describes) this pattern or set of events to the patient. In Hirsch’s words, 220 Notes