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I am very pleased to be given the opportunity to discuss Professor Seligman's paper. I find the paper beautifully written and extremely interesting. It touches on many relevant issues in terms of developmental psychology, differential psychopathology, and clinical technique. In this discussion I try to concentrate on one important clinical point: What constitutes psychic change? Seligman's technique to create “corrective engagements” by bringing “actions” like changes in the payment contract and “metaphors” like the Joan of Arc story and book, did facilitate intellectual development and some kind of emotional resonance, but I think they also acted more as a kind of comforters (Winnicott, 1985) that neutralized the emotional explosions and implosions (Kleimberg, 2006) that Harriet would have had to endure to truly have an experience of disillusionment, separation, and identification with the object if she were to truly develop an emotional symbolic function that would facilitate long-lasting states of mentalization and reflective functioning.
I value Seligman's contribution enormously. He is opening up a valuable window to explore and think about areas of psychopathology that are difficult to understand and treat. At the same time, I want to be cautious about introducing new psychoanalytic techniques that can be misused by our colleagues by assuming that these new techniques have produced or can produce the necessary deep, internal, and long-lasting psychic change that we all struggle to achieve with all patients, particularly with these difficult narcissistic and character disorder borderline ones. This type of technique could be useful for patients who we feel have no chance of being helped with our current analytic repertoire and perhaps by accepting at the same time that achieving this type of fragile and incomplete type of mentalization is as much as can be expected from them.