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The conceptual boundary between mirroring and interpreting is ambiguous, since verbally reflecting mental contents necessarily involves the consideration of meaning. Patients with mirror hunger, a condition of psychological fragmentation involving a chronic striving for self-consolidation through mirroring experiences, often find this ambiguity incomprehensible. They are often dissatisfied with anything but the most concrete mirroring of their verbal contents and fail to respond to another's empathic resonance. Their concreteness is analyzed as an incapacity to participate in an intersubjective field.
Dr. Frank is Clinical Director of the Brooklyn Community Counseling Center, Brooklyn, NY, and is an outpatient psychologist with St. Vincent's Catholic Medical Center of New York. He has a private practice in Forest Hills, Queens, New York.
Acknowledgment: This article has its origins in the early 1980s, in the form of a paper titled “Onto psychological Roots of Empathy,” written by the author for a Philosophy of Education seminar of Professor Tzvi Lamm at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where the author obtained his master's degree. More immediately, this paper began as part of the author's doctoral dissertation at the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University. In 1990, the author's dissertation advisor, Dr. Carl Auerbach, first heard out his unformed ideas and commented, “you seem to be asking the question, ‘what is mirroring?’” From this piece of intellectual mirroring he directed the author to Bruner and Vygotsky and, in a series of ensuing discussions on intersubjectivity theory and related topics, laid the groundwork for aspects of this paper.
Intersubjective fields are cultural mediums in which meanings can expand. This expansion, for individuals, is predicated on formative, affective experiences characterized by simultaneous interpersonal connectedness and differentiation. The ontological coherence of simultaneous connectedness and differentiation is demonstrated through a review of relevant areas of philosophy and of the contemporary infancy research. One conclusion of this analysis is that intersubjective expansion promotes self-consolidation. In mirror hunger, by contrast, there is a heightened drive toward self-consolidation, in the absence of intersubjective processes.
Mirroring is defined in terms of Vygotsky's theory of the zone of proximal development. Winnicott's concept of the potential space is adapted to describe the therapeutic mirroring relationship.