You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is not the self that engages in activities, Fast argues, after Kegan (1982); rather, the activities are the self. Fast thinks that interactions are more fundamental to the self than are sense perceptions or mental representations. This emphasis on behavior is a much needed one in psychoanalysis.
Extending her previous thoughts about development from nondifferentiated identity into differentiated states of identity (Fast, 1984),
Fast weaves the views of such theorists as Hartmann, Kernberg, Meissner, Eagle, Loewald, and Ogden into a readable and cohesive framework. She integrates Freud's concepts of das Ich and das Es with Ogden's views of the paranoid position—where things just seem to occur—and the depressive position—where things are believed to be personally accomplished. Fast considers the goal of psychoanalysis to be the “transformation of what has been experienced as an impersonal occurrence into experience that has a quality of I-ness” (pp. 73-74). She contrasts this goal with the classical one, in which the function “is to remove the drive distortions from representations” (p. 30). But the goal of psychoanalysis articulated by Fast does not easily account for the difficulties of a person who does take responsibility for what happens and is burdened with harsh self-criticism, as Freud recognized in his views about the superego and Fairbairn (1952) identified in his ideas about the antilibidinal ego. Other possible aspects of selving, such as ideal selving, undesirable selving, and theories of one's selvings, will need to be addressed in this “theory.” As it stands now, Fast's interactional view of the self is too simple.
Fast's thinking centers on the sense of “I-ness.” She discusses trauma and dissociation, seeing dissociative experiences as not connected in a stable way with this sense of I-ness. Having downplayed the importance of self-representations, Fast does not differentiate the psychological aftermath of traumatic experiences from experiences (and