“Self Psychologists” Everywhere??: Response to Virginia Goldner*

Understandably Virginia Goldner is furious with me. she states, “yet Lindon derisively characterizes may request for clarity as an obsessional preoccupation appropriate to ‘debates about who is buried in Grant's Tomb’” (p. 312). Yet when I read my reply to her commentary, I find that I wrote:

I disagree with Goldner and Flax (1993) that “truth is discourse specific….” That notion may apply if we are debating who is buried in Grant's Tomb, but when we come to what the patient is experiencing, it is the patient who is the absolute arbiter. As Schwaber (1990) states, “Real is what each of us experiences as true—the correctness of which no other one of us can be the arbiter” (p. 232) [Lindon, 1994b, p. 627].

I am sorry—and astonished—that Goldner experienced that paragraph as derision or that I was in some way calling her obsessional; I certainly do not experience it that way, nor do I see how she arrived at that idea. And that is precisely the point I was trying to make: that her experience is hers; she experienced it as real and true, “the correctness of which no other one of us can be the arbiter.” Now, knowing how she experienced what I wrote, I can understand the strident tone in her polemic and her rage at me for what she experienced as my real denigration of her personally.