Yes, One Self Is Enough!

I take Dr. Slavin's admonitions to heart. He claims that I failed to view David's experience from within the patient's own perspective. At least I can try to view Dr. Slavin's discussion of my article from within his perspective. Dr. Slavin appears to feel constrained by my assumption of “a striving for self-integration.” He views this assumption as an imposition that forces David to conform to a limiting, rigid, narrow, one-dimensional sense of self, one that denies the inherent multiplicity and duplicity of the self. He argues that I emphasize a striving for self-integration at the expense of a recognition of the patient's subjective experience, those complex, multiple, divergent, conflicting, and disparate subunits. As a consequence of my assumptions, Dr. Slavin believes, David will have no impact on me or on my varieties of self-experience.

It is suggested that my attempt to listen, understand, and explore David's experience is an attempt to soothe him and is based on a “simple” deficit model of pathology. I therefore recognize neither David's nor my own darker sides. To make his point, Dr. Slavin offers a series of imaginary, hypothetical musings by David about the continually unarticulated process that Dr. Slavin believes to provide a subtext for my “as-if” interactions with David.

Although obviously not intended to do so, Dr. Slavin's discussion provides an eloquent depiction of me as providing David with a coherent, temporally continuous, and multiply motivated analyst. Simultaneously, Dr. Slavin depicts David and himself as striving to understand my “self,” thereby trying to make sense out of our mutual, ongoing interaction—whether as analyst and patient, or as writer and critic. His discussion is not a testament to his own multiplicity, but to his striving for integration in the face of challenges to his preferred way of organizing and integrating himself.

The Dr. Slavin who lauds me for my courage in presenting this case, the Dr. Slavin who criticizes me for