Legacy and Future—A Living Link

Nearly eight hundred years ago, the great Zen master, Dogen, expressed in a few inspiring lines the ideas with which we are struggling these days, in our challenging multi-dialog concerning the name of our discipline and community.

“To study the Way (Buddhism) is to study the self.To study the self is to forget the self.To forget the self is to be one with others.”

This Koan, expressing the beginning-less and never-ending cyclical motion between the emergence of “phenomenal self” to its dissolving into a “transcendent Oneness of non-self,” seems to reflect the same oscillation occurring in our discussion concerning the issue of our “name” and of our identity.

Yet, in contrast to the ancient wisdom of Buddhism that never strives for an illusory solution of the paradoxical vibrating essence of the human

condition, our current dialogue reflects our naive inclination to decipher the mystery of life riddle that resides between the phenomenology of “relative reality” and the metaphysics of “ultimate reality.”

The notion of the “self” was a crucial issue for humans and their various philosophies for at least three millennia, both in the East and in the West, and its emergence as a formal encompassing orientation within psychoanalysis via the revolution of self psychology is a kind of miraculous blessing to the whole domain of psychoanalysis, connecting it to the great spirit of man throughout history.

One of Kohut's great achievements was the fact that he coined his worldview by the core idea of the human self, not making his revolution a monument for his personal name. This occurrence was in total contrast to most other psychoanalytic schools, which bore the names of their founders, Freudian, Kleinian, Winnicottian, Bionian, Lacanian psychoanalyses—consequently requiring later adaptation of new versions of their original names, e.g, Pos