Anxiety and the Psychic Center of the Psychoanalytic Self1

DURING THE LAST TWO DECADES, the psychology of the self has been moving to the center of psychoanalytic attention. And it promises to remain a dominant factor in therapeutic inquiry for a number of reasons. Consider but a few, especially as background for the present discussion. First, empirical: After the failure of a consistently instinctual-libidinal approach to interpretive metapsychology, and as the patient's ego or self-system increasingly became part of direct psychoanalytic inquiry since the 1930s, a patient could perceive aspects of a psychoanalyst's personality even beyond the psychoanalyst's own self-awareness. Second, systematic: After the cracking of the metaphor of the uninvolved mirror, and as countertransference, counterresistance, and counteranxiety increasingly became part of direct psychoanalytic inquiry since the 1950s, psychoanalysts could each use their psychic resources in their own individual ways directly in their therapeutic work with patients. Finally, interpretive: After the breakdown of the average, expectable standards of the cultural environment to which both patients and psychoanalysts adjust and adapt, and as pluralism in interpretive metapsychology increasingly became part of the psychoanalytic structure since the 1960s, any two coparticipants in psychoanalytic inquiry could realize the uniqueness of their emergent individuation in the direct experience with one another.

It is against the background of such themes that I discuss the enlarged field of psychic process and pattern now made available for psychoanalytic inquiry. All three suggest the growing acceptance of a new clinical observation: a psychic point of origin, an