Discussion of Arnold Modell's “The Private Self and Private Space”

Arnold Modell has, in the past 30 years, established himself as one of the half-dozen American psychoanalysts whose writings have expressed an original, internally consistent theoretical and clinical viewpoint. Whenever I have been asked for the names of colleagues whose conceptual work I most respect, I have more often than not singled out Modell because, despite numerous differences in style and detail, I have found the widest agreement between his understanding of our discipline and my own and because I have found in his writings the kind of regard for accuracy, logical rigor, respect for the contributions of those who adhere to schools of thought different from his own, and attention to the overall requirements of psychoanalytic theory that are lacking in the works of colleagues whose work is merely fashionable.

In his chapter Modell has, in one sense, returned to the theme of his enormously influential paper of 1965, namely, the difficulties of carving out an autonomous existence—what he now calls a “private space.” When he wrote “On the Right to a Life,” Modell (1965) was engaged in preparing his first book, Object Love and Reality, (1968) a work that deals with the crucial role of object relations in personality development and is a major statement about the essential vicissitudes of human bonding for adaptation. Thus, from the beginning of his career as a psychoanalytic theorist, Modell gave equal weight to both aspects of what he calls the “paradoxical” human need for simultaneous dependency and autonomy. Perhaps this balance in his thinking has, in the interval, been to some extent screened by his consistent espousal of object relations theory in a succession of publications that (in my eyes) has earned him the mantle of Winnicott's most important successor.