Correspondence

I Would Like to join briefly in the discussion between James Astor and Louis Zinkin because it appears to me that a methodological principle is involved: the issue of evaluating the significance of propositions and distinguishing between speculations, facts and conclusions.

I will start from a false impression that I have given Louis Zinkin, no doubt due to my tendency to compress, of which so many complain. He believes that I claim the primary self as an ‘intellectual necessity’. It never was so. At first my proposition (hypothesis) about the ‘original self’, as I first called it, grew out of the observation of self symbols, especially mandalas, in children's dreams and phantasies. I then speculated that, contrary to current views in analytical psychology, the self came first before the dichotomy of conscious-unconscious. At the time it was assumed than an infant was essentially unconscious, in its structural and dynamic sense, and that ego fragments emerged in some way like islets in a sea. The ego fragments were at first unintegrated with each other. To underline my doubt about that classical proposition I changed the word ‘original’ to ‘primary’.

All that was hypothetical but, supposing it was true, it followed that an integrated infant had no means of relating to his mother. I concluded that the self must deintegrate: this idea is the ‘intellectual necessity’ to which Zinkin refers.

Since then a mass of information has been collected both from child analysis, infant—mother observation and studies on intrauterine life, which gives body to my speculative thought so that my proposition is beginning to transform into a description of what happens. That is, in my view, the best that we can hope to achieve in any theoretical disquisition. It depicts a hypothesis leading to discovery.

Zinkin's ideas about what can be called primary self take my postulate outside the field of its intended application. He is at liberty to do so, and if he wants to use other terms my only ob