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I am most grateful for Dr. Gedo's inspiration and encouragement of my work throughout the thirty-odd years we have known one another and collaborated in several capacities. Indeed, this essay is an outgrowth of some thoughts that I jotted down upon reading The Languages of Psychoanalysis Gedo, (1996). Dr. Gedo was kind enough to comment on these notes, and urged me to pursue this work. I believe that the theoretical framework that John Gedo has developed throughout the years fits best with updated information on the functioning brain.
As I address the concept of the organization of overall functioning and identity which I regard as “self,” I find as many definitions as I find psychoanalytic writers. Such reified words “tend to be imbued with a power of their own, and create pseudo-realities if one is not careful” Basch, (1984), p. 37). The group of so-called self psychologists, who use “self” as both noun and adjective, has failed to relate the concept of self-functioning to underlying brain mechanisms, or to address the maturational and developmental origins of this functional concept. Indeed there has been a strong tendency to regard self-organization as a structure (the “self”) rather than as a flexible, dynamic function, dependent on the orderly maturational sequence of neural mechanisms and the organization of, as I see it, six motivational systems.
Mahler, Pine, and Berman (1975) refer to a “process of self-definition,” which comes close to my notion of integrated motivational systems. Daniel Stern (1985) devoted most of The Interpersonal World of the Infant to a psychological understanding of the development of the infant's “sense of self” and “self with other” experiences. He states: “A crucial term here is ‘sense of,’ as distinct from ‘concept