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Your response inspired me to attempt to extend the metaphor a little further.  It allows for multiple interpretations… 

If the role of trainer is restricted to a ground person advising the rider, then any account, by the rider of the horse’s behavior, is privileged.  The rider has direct access to the horse.  Physical access to the balance, contact, and internal activities of the animal.  The trainer, in turn relies on indirect sources of information, observations and second hand accounts.  This position is advantageous in the objectivity it confers. 

This situation can be interpreted in terms of the patient-therapist storyteller unconscious interactions.  The both the patient’s conscious and unconscious can be observed by the therapist.  The therapist’s conscious is accessible to the patient, but their unconscious is not.  There is an asymmetry in the patient-therapist relation according to this characterization.  A certain lack of reciprocity on the part of the therapist?  Inevitable?  Necessary? 

Or the trainer’s responsibilities might include riding the horse.  The horse’s performance will be affected by the different rider.  The differences between the rider and trainer’s style will give rise to different responses from the horse.  Any observation of the horse’s behavior is necessarily subjective because of the influence of the rider.  This permits the trainer to communicate directly with horse; teach the horse.

Here the trainer or therapist is assuming the task of the storyteller in relation to the horse as the unconscious.  This is the synthesis of a new individual or person?  Is it possible?  Well, there was the time a person tried to teach me how to talk to my unconscious by engaging it in conversation…  This process seems to displace the patient’s storyteller.  When the patient's conscious and the unconscious are separated, the storyteller is silenced.  So the therapist's unconscious and storyteller are interacting with the patient's unconscious?  Or is the therapist's unconscious also silenced?  

Seriously stretching the metaphor, have we reached the limit of its usefulness?  I think we, or at least I, need another story.