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It is tempting to applaud and commend Curtis for her attempt to read receptively a psychoanalytic work coming from another intellectual tradition—European phenomenology—than her own. Instead, I will simply say thank you for acknowledging our contribution. Unfortunately, Curtis continually faults us for speaking in our own voices and from our own sources instead of those of others. (At the same time she places us in a tradition—Kohutian self psychology—with which we have a family resemblance, but which is not the original source of many of our main ideas.) This leads me to the less important of the two matters I can address in a brief comment.
What are the purposes and functions of scholarly citation? It seems to me that there are several. For me, the primary one is to acknowledge that one works within intellectual traditions, and as a member of communities of scholars. By citing others, I tell the reader that I know I have not invented the wheel. Nor has anyone within memory—not even Freud. A closely related function of scholarly citation is to place oneself and one's ideas within a particular intellectual tradition, and to give credit to the actual influences on one's work. In my case, for example, Harry Stack Sullivan and Clara Thompson are not important influences, so I do not cite them. To do so would simply give a false picture of my reading and of my own sense of intellectual indebtedness. Stephen Mitchell, on the other hand, has significantly influenced my thinking about many problems in psychoanalysis, and I cite him in almost everything I write.
A third purpose of citation is to indicate, and sometimes to discuss, diverging views. (The work of our colleagues Lichtenberg, Lachmann, and