Letter

To the Editor:

I was happy to see Richard Chessick's very favorable review (Psychoanalytic Books, 1, 73-78) of our volume Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory, edited by Stanley Messer, Robert Woolfolk, and myself. I am afraid, however, that I must respond to the critical comments which Dr. Chessick directed to one of my contributions to the volume, “The Self in Contemporary Psychoanalysis,” a brief response to a paper by Charles Taylor in which I discuss self psychology among other topics.

The remarks I made in response to Taylor's paper seem to have fallen on something like a tin ear. Dr. Chessick quotes me as saying that some patients may not have an inner life—a statement obviously made in a polemical context and not meant to be taken in the literal way that Chessick's tone of shocked incredulity seems to imply. I cannot imagine how I could have made this any more obvious, since what I actually wrote was:

Outrageous as it may sound at first, we ought to ask how many patients might not, in a sense, have had an inner life before they learned of it from their Kohutian therapist…By “inner life,” I mean, of course, a life that the patient experiences as being in some essential sense inner, unique, private. (emphasis added)

Chessick's remarks here come perilously close to being a misrepresentation of what I said, as I think should be obvious to anyone who reads my text.

If Dr. Chessick knows anything at all about contemporary discussions either in the hermeneutic tradition or in cultural anthropology, then he must surely be aware that this is not really such an unusual thing to suggest; many anthropologists, for example, have pointed to the sense of the unique, inner self as being virtually absent in a great many cultures. Obviously this does not mean anything so foolish as that people in such