August 14, 1991

Dr. Kwawer has usefully corrected an omission in my historical summary of the concept of "the self," namely the "Chicago school" of social psychology of Mead, Cooley, and their students. As he notes, Harry Stack Sullivan attributed his interpersonal theory of the self-system to the contributions of these men (along with the psychobiology of Adolph Meyer). Thereby, he introduced an explicitly interpersonal perspective into psychoanalysis in advance of Winnicott, whom I credited, perhaps undeservedly, with accomplishing a fundamental shift in perspective about the formation of the self. of course, any implication that Winnicott was the first to break away from the "encapsulated, representational tradition" would be incorrect. In the first place, he was influenced by earlier object-relations theorists like Michael Balint, himself a student of Ferenczi, and one may even agree