Letter

To the Editor:

Marilyn Nissim-Sabat has written a review of Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life (Psychoanalytic Books, 6, 29-38) that, at first glance, appears to be a thoughtful, highly critical appraisal of the assumptions underlying our work. On closer study, however, this review, like her 1986 discussion of two of our previous books (Faces in a Cloud, 1979, 1993 and Structures of Subjectivity, ), is substantially askew with respect to our most central ideas. It has seemed to us that she reads over our work, idiosyncratically rethinks and transforms its content, and then subjects the resulting reimagined text to what then appears as a careful evaluation. The difficulty we encounter responding to her review arises because she so often criticizes assumptions we never made and attacks arguments we never proposed. It is also our impression that her critical discussion shows an animosity toward us that we are not sure we understand, and this too makes it very hard to write an answer to her essay.

In what follows, we attempt nevertheless to address the most important points emphasized in her remarks.

1. The heart of Nissim-Sabat's review of Contexts of Being begins with a discussion of what we call the myth of the isolated mind. She writes: “The ‘isolated mind’ is a reified ‘subjective world’; its function is to defend against alienation…” (p. 29). The image of the isolated mind, as we discuss it in our book, is not a “reified subjective world”; in fact, we have no clear idea of what would even be involved in the reification of an entire subjective world. The image of the mind existing in isolation we understand as a reified symbol of a particular kind of alienated self-experience, one in which a sense of psychological aloneness is very prominent. The function of maintaining an image of oneself as an isolated mind is not “to defend against alienation,” as she writes, but instead to protect the individual against an array of anxieties t