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It has long been known that ancient ontology works with “Thing-concepts” and that there is a danger of “reifying consciousness.” … Why does this reifying always keep coming back to exercise its dominion?
—Heidegger, 1927, p. 487
In his critique of our (Stolorow and Atwood, 2012) opposition to the language of “the self,” Videgård (2013), it seems to us, wants to have his phenomenological cake and eat his metaphysical entities too. He actually lends strength to our position when he notes Kohut's (1977) admission that he “never explains how the essence of the self should be defined” (p. 310). This lack of definition leaves the meaning of Kohut's use of the expression open to various interpretations, allowing Videgård
to interpret it as mere metaphor. But such an interpretation is at variance with Kohut's own usage, as he goes on to explain “that ‘the self’ … is a generalization derived from empirical data” (1977, p. 311, emphasis added). An empirical generalization is not a metaphor. Kohut explains further:
We can describe the various cohesive forms in which the self appears, can demonstrate the several constituents that make up the self—its poles (ambitions and ideals) and the area of talents and skills that is interposed between the poles—and explain their genesis and functions. (1977, p. 311)
It seems apparent that, in this passage, Kohut is describing an entity or thing that makes its appearance in various cohesive forms and that is composed of constituents (poles, talents, skills) that serve functions. It is precisely such reifications of selfhood to which we have objected. Moreover, it is astonishing to us that Videgård thinks that our own expression, the experiencing of selfhood, could easily be construed as referring to content within a Cartesian isolated mind. Anyone familiar with the trajectory of our work over the past three decades would know that, for us, selfhood is a dimension of emotional experiencing profoundly embedded and engaged in constitutive conte