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Joe Lichtenberg had a passion for exploring and elaborating the human condition. That passion was something we shared. This monograph honors our commitment to that exploration and its clinical implications that we dialogued about before he died.
I will never forget that Sunday morning around 10AM when he called. He said, “Arthur, I have an idea I know you will understand. It is a personal sense of power.” This is how this monograph was born. We confirmed that he did not mean a sense of power over another. We elaborated that we meant a sense of power as a motivating process influencing the organization and expression of one’s sense of self. We spoke for about 45 minutes. Joe talked of agency, affect, intentions, and goals. The sense of power resulted from an agentic assertion realized or unrealized. Realized, that assertion resulted in a sense of power. Unrealized, there would be a loss of that sense. We shared that the sense of power would wax or wane according to whether one’s intention could be realized or were thwarted. My emphasis was that the stability of a sense of power reflected the stability of one’s sense of cohesiveness, coherence. An unstable waxing and waning of a personal sense of power reflected an unstable sense of self. A stable sense of power is maintained even in states of frustrated intentions.
Joe preferred to emphasize the frustration model. We then talked about successful and unsuccessful ways of restoring a loss of power. Again, I sustained the notion that restoring a loss of power was more or less successful depending on the stability of the sense of self. With our excited exploration, Joe promised to send me a draft of his ideas. He wished to have me contribute to the monograph.
As Joe was writing out his conceptualization of a personal sense of power, Mady Chalk was there as “his sounding board” (Prologue, this issue, p. 789). She shared in, encouraged, and challenged his evolving formulations. Joe explored his developing ideas with Elizabeth