John Fiscalini is a training and supervising analyst and faculty member at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology; director of clinical training at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis; and an associate clinical professor at the New York University postdoctoral program in psychoanalysis. He is the coeditor of Narcissism and the Interpersonal Self and a coeditor of The Handbook of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis. John Fiscalini is a training and supervising analyst and faculty member at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology; director of clinical training at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis; and an associate clinical professor at the New York University postdoctoral program in psychoanalysis. He is the coeditor of Narcissism and the Interpersonal Self (Columbia, 1993) and a coeditor of The Handbook of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis (Analytic Press, 1995). He is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City.Traditionally, two clinical models have been dominant in psychoanalysis: the classical paradigm, which views the analyst as an objective mirror, and the participant-observation paradigm, which views the analyst as an intersubjective participant-observer. According to John Fiscalini, an evolutionary shift in psychoanalytic consciousness has been taking place, giving rise to coparticipant inquiry, a third paradigm that represents a dramatic shift in analytic clinical theory and that has profound clinical implications.
Coparticipant inquiry integrates the individualistic focus of the classical tradition and the social focus of the participant-observer perspective. It is marked by a radical emphasis on analysts' and patients' analytic equality, emotional reciprocity, psychic symmetry, and relational mutuality. Unlike the previous two paradigms, coparticipant inquiry suggests that we are all inherently l3%