The Self and Symbolic Realization

IN THE AMBIGUITY OF CHANGE(1983), Levenson has, in the words of one commentator, "torn psychoanalytic treatment away from its rootedness in drives … and has substituted the broadening of awareness through attention to the context as well as the content of language" (E. G. Witenberg). In the course of this endeavor, Levenson unmasks a contradiction at the core of Sullivan's theory of the self; namely, that if the child comes to a sense of participation and control via the organization of experience through language, then anxiety and dread should represent a breakdown in meaning rather than a manifestation, due to a deficient control system, of an intrinsic terror. Yet the latter view was the one embraced by Sullivan. As described by Levenson (1983): "Sullivan left us a strange phobic heritage about the nature of anxiety, and we still tend to treat extreme anxiety as nothing but impending disaster, better to be ameliorated than faced" (p. 133). The point is obvious once it is stated: If the elaboration of symbolic meaning is said to be basic to what we are about, then one cannot legitimately import a biological source as motivating factor without showing how a biological source becomes an aspect of symbolic meaning. self realization, as well as for the undermining of authentic relatedness. The dialectic between an experiential I and a verbal me is presented as resulting in a process of symbolic realization that is purposeful, responsible and uniquely individual. Pathology is described in terms of the ideological and affective capturing of this process of symbolic realization. The clinical implications of this view are addressed in relation to the work of Robert Langs.

a) The I myself as me.

In An Essay in Esthetics by Way of a Preface Ortega y Gasset (1975) makes the wry comment that when Kant urges us to act so as not to use others as means but as ends to our actions, he is saying that we