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I AM GRATEFUL TO ANNE ALVAREZ, VIRGINIA DEMOS, AND JAMES Grotstein for their discussions. Not surprisingly, each is a contribution in itself, with its own distinctive and formidable voice. Generously and yet critically, they remind us of how much stimulating and challenging work can be done in the areas about which they comment, and they suggest multiple directions with important and intricate implications. Rather than trying to take these up one by one, I will comment on several broad issues. I first emphasize the relationships between Kleinian and intersubjective theories and the “oneperson” versus “two-person” problem in building psychoanalytic models, which are somewhat more explicitly and extensively addressed in Alvarez's and Grotstein's papers, and conclude with some comments about trauma, turning in greater detail to Demos's points.
From different perspectives, each respondent takes up the issues involved in what Alvarez, with the perceptiveness that pervades her paper, has called “an internal two-person psychology,” a concept that captures a key focus of my own paper. On the theoretical level, I tried to show how intersubjective infant research and modern Kleinian thinking can be brought together to yield a strong psychoanalytic model of psychic life oriented in just such internal two-person structures.
In particular, as Demos says, I take off from the observationally oriented infant researchers' emphasis on mutual influence processes by paying particular attention to asymmetrical influence patterns in