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As I have been invited to comment on Dr. Reis's Essay, I will take the opportunity to respond briefly to his remarks on my use of Hegel's concepts in order to clarify my position. Reis states that, in my model, “self—consciousness moves … from a condition of solipsism to a relational position,” but he objects to this conception of movement, pointing out that the
recognition of the other as a separate yet related other as an end point in itself is insufficient. Interdependence, established through identification with the other, is not yet intersubjectivity. For Hegel, subjectivity remains equated with the conscious subject in competition with the other … [but] … that competition would already represent a differentiation of subject from object.
Actually, I agree with Reis on both counts—regarding the insufficiency of identification and the fact that competition could be said to presume a prior differentiation. Indeed, I believe these points were the gist of my argument in The Bonds of Love (1988), in which I aimed to differentiate my view of intersubjectivity not only from the Hegelian idea of competition but also from the ego—psychological theory of internalization. Like Ogden, I adopted Hegel's dialectic critically, with a crucial emendation. I stated that the problem with Hegel is that, in his formulation, the self does not want to recognize the other (1988, p. 53) but, as in Freud's notions of how the self relinquishes narcissism, does so because it must. By contrast, I tried to read Hegel through Winnicott, showing how Winnicott's (1997) description makes