A Perspective on Responsibility

TO BEGIN WITH, THE "SELF" is not a topology of mind like ego, id and superego, but a perspective on awareness and an interpersonal one, at that. The self is the way an individual personifies himself as he stands outside of himself. It is an act of hallucinatory self-consciousness. The exact nature of self and how it develops is a Pandora's box of reflected appraisals, introjects, projects and hallucinatory percepts. As M. Khan (1974) puts it,

… no matter how zealously or critically one studies this varied and perplexing literature, no clear definition of self, as a concept, crystallizes; although each of us feels sure about what he means when he uses the concept self, it is hard to communicate the meaning to another … no one can communicate directly from his self or can be related to directly in his self.

I intend to limit myself to the implications of this for therapy. There would hardly be any point in having a symposium on our differences in the theory of self unless it were an a priori assumption that one's theory of self affects the way one does therapy. Therefore, I suspect that we are really talking indirectly about our theories of responsibility and change in psychoanalytic therapy. For example, if we were to believe that man is predetermined, condemned by original sin, socio-economic and cultural oppression, biological and biochemical deficiency or even very early deprivation, it would clearly affect our attitude about what could be done to ameliorate the patient's circumstances and how best to go about it. It seems to me that there is a continuum of perspectives on responsibility (or freedom) that starts at one end