Response to the Commentaries by David Milrod

I am very appreciative of the effort, time, and serious thought each of the discussants have contributed to what has now, because of them, become a joint effort. Clearly, coming from different disciplines, or differing schools within the same discipline, misunderstandings and confusions are bound to arise. Some of these must await further work before greater clarity and approximation of understanding will be possible. Some differences simply have to be faced as basic disagreements which time may not overcome. Four of the commentaries come from psychoanalysts or analytically oriented workers, and three from neuroscientists or neuroscientifically oriented workers. I will first discuss the psychoanalytically related commentaries, followed by those of the neuroscientists. One of my reactions to reading the psychoanalytic comments, was an impulse to be drawn into a discussion of psychoanalytic theory, which I largely tried to resist, not always successfully. In part I could not entirely avoid it because of the nature of some of the contributions.

I was puzzled about how to respond to Dr. Goldberg's comments. His passionate antipathy to ego psychology is well known, so that the content of his contribution is not surprising. In my paper I chose not to deal with other schools of psychoanalytic theory because it would make the undertaking too broad, too lengthy, and would shift the focus away from the one I chose, namely the sharing of psychoanalytic ideas with neuroscientists. Had it been my purpose to compare the views of 2 or more schools of psychoanalytic theory, the school of self psychology would have been an obvious choice, especially because I was examining the self and the self representation. Despite Dr. Goldberg's conviction that ego psychology has outlived its usefulness, I along with many psychoanalysts do not agree with him, and I count myself among the many who believe that it remains the most versatile, all encompassing, theoretical school of psychoanalysis wi