Author's Response

On receiving, and before reading, the discussions of this paper, I was uneasy. Four and a half years have passed since it was written, and not much less since I last looked at it and submitted it to The Forum. Additionally, it was purposely written, as Dr. Mahler recognized, with deliberately oversimplified statements. Issues taken up in other papers and other aspects of the subject already well established by psychoanalytic data and theory are barely noted, much less discussed. And I continued to use a style of writing that has

made some analytic colleagues uneasy. To them I seem simplistic, having forsworn (with some hedging) technical psychoanalytic language if nothing would be gained by using it, or if there is no consensus in psychoanalysis on the meaning of a word, or if the word allegedly refers to a reality I cannot grasp, or if there is a common English word with the same meaning. (Leites, in The New Ego, has dealt devastatingly with the issue of analytic syntax.)

This paper, then, may seem a blunder to those who cannot believe that a psychoanalyst could talk about the earliest stages of personality development without using theory built from such concepts as cathexis, narcissism, or object representations. Yet I do not believe that enlarging concepts into metaconcepts will help us to extricate ourselves from the problem of not knowing what goes on silently inside an infant's psyche, the main methodological problem in my research. Concepts do not close gaps in argument; they only ease the pain.

Now, having used this forum for ax-grinding—unprovoked by any of the discussants—let me deal with issues they raise.

I am surprised and pleased that most agreed with the point that seems to me the most important and controversial in the paper, which is the implication that, for understanding personality development, we make even heavier use of the data and concepts relating to non-conflictual learning than analytic theory has done. One of Freud's astonishing contribu