Vicious Circles:—The Self and the Rhetoric of Emerging and Unfolding1

I WISH TO DISCUSS CERTAIN implications of a point of view I have come to call cyclical psychodynamics because it locates the heart of the psychodynamic process not in the patient's preserved past but in the vicious cycles which past events set in motion. This approach is rooted in the theoretical contributions of writers such as Horney (1939), Sullivan (1953), and Erikson (1950), but departs from their views at significant junctures and reworks them in ways they themselves might find uncongenial. The resultant has a great debt to each but makes on claim to being true to any.

Central to this point of view is the notion that the seemingly infantile wishes and ideas that are revealed in psychoanalytic work persist not in spite of the person's present reality but precisely because of it. When one looks closely enough at the person's daily interactions, one finds that each person skews his experiences in distinctive fashion, selecting with whom to interact and evoking particular sides of those he does encounter so as to make his environment as unique and pathognomonic as a fingerprint. When one looks carefully at the fine details of the patient's daily interactions, there turns out to be no "average expectable environment."

Hartmann's (1939) introduction of that term was, to be sure, part of an effort to bring reality back into psychoanalytic theory, to amplify the perspective—never fully absent from psychoanalysis but kept well in the background until the 1920's—that looked for the roots of our actions not just in drives welling up from within