Discussions of “Contemporary Perspectives on Self: Toward an Integration”

Continuing his efforts to formulate a comprehensive “relational psychoanalysis,” Stephen Mitchell focuses on the concept of the “self” and reviews selected aspects of current views on the subject. He offers a challenging addition to recent discussions of object relations and the self. His paper deals directly with a few of the many theoretical, methodological, and clinical issues that have occupied the literature of the self in the last 20 years; however, the few aspects that Mitchell chooses for constructing his own views are essential ones. My discussion is necessarily limited to only a few points of agreement and disagreement that seem particularly important.

Early in his far-ranging and scholarly paper, Mitchell notes that there is a great deal of concern with the self in modern psychoanalysis and that this marks a difference from the concerns of classical psychoanalysis. This general concern, however, with what Schafer (1989) has called “the most popular figure in modern, innovative psychoanalytic accounts of human development and action” (p. 153) has, as Mitchell observes, produced little consensus as to what the term means. He rejects the idea that the term self does not mean anything. Instead, he suggests that self means many things. He adds that various alternative and allegedly competing characterizations of the self are, in fact, complementary. Therefore, he combines them to give a multifaceted view of self and of clinical approaches to problems of the self assembled from his presentations of various selected points of view. The conception that emerges in the paper is of a self that is simultaneously subject and object, multiple