David Milrod's “The Concept of the Self and the Self Representation”

Reading Dr. Milrod's paper1 is very much like reading a primer on psychoanalytic ego psychology written by someone who is a master of it and, so, able to make it sound clear and simple. Yet I could not help but feel that the author had somehow slept through the revolution. That revolution has occurred in the last twenty or thirty years in psychoanalysis and has made almost every sentence in Milrod's essay an issue either of argument or of downright error. Now some of these contentious points have to do with mere differences of viewpoint or even of vocabulary, as Milrod's notes in his mention of Stern and Kohut. That he chose not to pursue these intellectual paths is an option that I may believe is unfair to the reader, but it is one that can possibly be justified. However, some of his ideas about development are quite open to question, especially with present-day thought about nonlinear dynamic systems. I think the work of Thelen has forced us to give up on the linear model espoused by Milrod. And some of his ideas about infancy and infant development are clearly in error. The quaint story of the infant mind espoused by Anna Freud is really quite at odds with what one reads in human development journals. Here we enter an arena of error or misstatement that demands correction.

More to the point is Dr. Milrod's decision about just what comprises mainstream psychoanalysis (p. 16 fn.), and what he has decided to ignore. Most of his references are to the psychoanalysis of forty or fifty years ago, and yet most of the exciting work on the self has occurred in the last twenty years. If one couples this with the general philosophical outlook that Milrod's paper seems to support, the reader would hardly know of the current debate about the very uselessness of the concept of representationalism. Alas, this is more than unfair to the reader, since it threatens the entire basic enterprise under discussion by Milrod.

If one moves to the secondary point of the paper—the relationshi