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Man konnte die Menschen in zwei Klassen abteilen; in solche, die sich auf eine Metapher und in solche, die sich auf eine Formel verstehn. Deren, die sich auf beides verstehn, sind zu wenige, sie machen keine Klasse aus.
People may be divided in two groups: those who understand themselves as a metaphor and those who understand themselves as a formula. Those who understand themselves as both are too few to form a group.
In an early note Ferenczi (1913) drew attention to sensations of giddiness at the end of the analytic session and related them to the patient's disillusionment at his return to “reality” and the sudden loss of the analyst's psychic support which this entailed. Recently Kohut (1971) has also commented extensively on the analyst's function in orienting the patient towards his own and other selves, and has emphasized the mental and physical confusion, disorientation and loss of perspective which may result from a deliberate or unintentional lapse in this orienting function. Spatial, temporal, and personal orientation are cornerstones of the psychiatric examination and defects in these are generally taken as indicators of pathology. In a developmental context, Piaget (1954) notes that:
Through an apparently paradoxical mechanism … it is precisely when the subject is most self-centered that he knows himself the least, and it is to the extent that he discovers himself that he places himself in the universe and constructs it by virtue of that fact. In other words, egocentrism signifies the absence of both self-perception and objectivity, whereas acquiring possession of the object as such is on a par with the acquisition of self-perception. (p. xii)