Response to Discussions

Clinical psychoanalysis is a process by which analysand and analyst live through, struggle to understand, and sort out the most difficult, ambiguous, conflict-ridden dimensions of living. Psychoanalytic theorizing, therefore, of necessity, is forced to address and grapple with the knottiest, most paradoxical, most elusive of human phenomena. “Self” can certainly lay claim to being the knottiest, most paradoxical, most elusive problem of them all, bridging, as both Grossman and Wolf have noted, the subjective and the objective, conscious and unconscious, past and present, experiential and systemic. The sequential development of our ideas about different facets of self and the cross-fertilization of those different ideas lead to syntheses that, in turn, keep changing in their encounter with the theory-crunching complexities of the psychoanalytic process.

I am very appreciative of the manner in which Grossman and Wolf have attempted to engage my thinking about self by exploring similarities and differences in relation to their own approaches. The greatest hazard of comparing different theoretical traditions is that one must renounce any hope of comprehensiveness and also necessarily involve oneself in reduction (not reductionism) and simplification (not in a simplistic fashion). So I am grateful and accept Grossman's broadening of the ways Freud and Freudian theory can be interpreted and understood and Wolf's clarification of aspects of Kohut's contributions and his own particular extensions of them. Together they have raised important questions for me and stimulated further thinking about self, some features of which I will sketch out in this discussion.

I would like to take as a provocative starting point Grossman's argument that I am not systematic enough about unconscious organization and its relation to conscious experiences of self. I think he is right. He correctly intuits that I regard many of the relatively discontinuous