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During the time that Joe was writing “A Sense of Power,” he and I spoke about it almost daily. I was his sounding board. He read me sentences and paragraphs, wanting to make sure that he was communicating clearly the meaning he ascribed to this concept, a sense of power. He was determined to elaborate both a theory of a sense of power, and its application to the psychoanalytic process. He intended his work on power to be an elaboration of his previous work on motivational systems, narrative, and the nature of the clinical exchange between patient and therapist. In those formulations he spelled out “seeking” as the crucial source of motivation. As Joe said, “all creatures are born with some capacity to seek to discover what they need and want and to seek to obtain it, removing obstacles if necessary. Humans add to the motivational systems involved in successfully seeking a recognition of the meaning of their seeking to their own welfare and the welfare of others … in the absence of what they seek they can imagine – that is, create a fantasy – an illusion of the desired … … When dealing with an actuality, success in its attainment leads to pride [a sense of power] and an incentive to seek for the success, and failure results in disappointment and an incentive to modify and review the effort … Disruption of a broadly maintained illusion is often traumatic, leading to feels of disillusion … [a drop in the sense of power] … and deep feelings of pessimism, helplessness, confusion, shame, and a loss of vitality” (An Experience-Based Vision of Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice, Chapter 4, p. 109). Thus for Joe, the contribution of the concept of a “sense of power” was both a refinement of theory and a rethinking of the therapeutic relationship between analyst and patient.
Already apparent in Joe’s published papers and books and those published in collaboration with his colleagues, is his conceptual refinement of “a sense of power.” His early concepts of “a doer doing,” and