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My first reply in this symposium is to Reis regarding his elaborations of Mitchell's ideas that lend to comparisons of the Relationalists and the Intersubjectivists. I concur with Reis that differences between the two have less to do with language use per se than their views about analytic authority, to which I add the issue of analytic attitude. In replying to Clement, I underscore her important elaboration that Kohut's self psychology revolution has for Relational Psychoanalysis. In my final reply I address Jacob's argument that my comparison of the Relationalists and the Intersubjectivists is mired in “category errors” as well as my conflation of the “explanatory versus the phenomenological” levels of abstraction, which leads to spurious comparisons of the two theories. I argue instead that the “levels of abstraction” is essentially a specious argument that complicates rather than clarifying both theories use of language.
If illusion is defined as a false appearance, a belief that does not have its correspondence in the physical world, the current view in neuroscience is that everything the brain constructs is an illusion. Selves do not exist in the physical world; our perception of the self is a construction of our brain. Therefore, the self can also be described as an illusion. We essentially imagine ourselves. But we should not depreciate or disparage belief in illusions as false conceptions; if the self is an illusion and the feeling of agency is an illusion, these are illusions without which we cannot live. (Modell, 2008, p. 362)
All theories are metaphors; metaphors help us bridge from the theory to the phenomenology. (Thelin, 2005)