You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
AS EVERYONE WHO HAS BEEN AN ANALYST for a quarter of a century, I have acquired conceptions and ways of working that are more or less my own. I have borrowed freely, and freely modified what I have borrowed. Each listener may judge for himself whether I have borrowed the best ideas, and whether my modifications are creatively inventive or blindly autistic. In any case, I have coined few if any neologisms!
Most of the items in my frame of reference for psychotherapy will not get into the picture this evening. (Incidentally, the term "psychotherapy, " or simply "therapy, " will refer indiscriminately to "psychoanalysis, " "intensive psychotherapy, " "deep psychotherapy, " "analysis of the total personality, " and so forth.) What I shall discuss are several topics which I believe can be clarified by the combined use of the two concepts, the "inter-personal" and the "intra-personal."
Inter-personal refers to cause and effect relations between individuals. Intra-personal refers to cause and effect relations between parts of a single individual. For instance, "Bill hates John, " is an inter-personal statement; "John hates himself, " is an intra-personal statement. John's intra-personal self-hatred is, of course, a result of previous inter-personal relationships. But it may outlive the relationships which caused it by becoming part of the structure