Reply to Astor's ‘Are Urban and Colman really in opposition over Fordham's model of the self?’

I would like to thank James Astor for his careful attention to the issues raised by the ongoing debate between Elizabeth Urban and myself as represented in our respective papers on the self (Vol. 53, 3, ). Let me say first of all that I agree with his conclusion, namely that Fordham and Urban's language is at odds with their actual scientific observations and thus that it is the language that has gone awry. To my mind, concepts such as the primary self and the central archetype do imply the existence of a priori structures and are therefore, at best, confusing and, at worst, they result in the kind of hypostatization that then has to be eschewed. This is why I have argued that they are unnecessary to explain the sort of carefully observed detailed clinical data that Urban puts forward in her account of Vejayan's moment of insight and the emergence of a capacity for inference. As I see it, Urban tends to account for her observations as manifestations of the central archetype. This suggests that the archetype precedes the manifestations which are thus ‘emergent’ from the archetype. I would put it the other way around - that insofar as archetypal structures exist, they are emergent properties of interactive processes such as the ones that Urban describes between Vejayan and herself. This way of arguing has been spelled out in much greater detail by the Boston Change Process Study Group in their recent paper on implicit process (BCPSG 2007). There they reverse the traditional psychoanalytic view that regards psychic structures as ‘deep’ and ‘primary’ and the details of relational interaction as secondary and ‘superficial’. Instead they propose that these surface interactions are primary and structures emerge out of them as the outcome of repeated interactive processes.

This chimes in with the view I first put forward in 1999 that the self is a process (Colman 2000). So in one respect there is more than language involved here insofar as Astor states that ‘the self is proc