You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, der taglich sie erobern muß
(Freedom and Life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew)
In response to Paul Deasy, let me start off with the spontaneous remark I made on first hearing his commentary when I presented this paper at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy, in January 2009: “This is a dream discussant.” He not only grasps the essentials of my thesis, but is able to explicate it through a tour de force parsing of two key sentences in the paper that summarize its conceptualization of the nature of therapeutic action. Furthermore, he has clearly done background work to assimilate the paper's perspectives, by studying the previous papers (Varga, 2005, 2006), leading up to this one, so as to better understand my rationale for reconceptualizing the analyst's role from serving as a “transformational object” to serving as an “individuating alter ego.” Finally, he has even adduced further support for the conceptualization of psychopathology as arising from parental appropriating identification by citing some of the developmental literature consistent with this conceptualization.
Given his excellent grasp of my thesis, the only correction I would make is to the following: He states toward the end of his commentary, “The individuating alter ego stance places the analyst on the child pole of the parent-child identifications and, importantly, in the role of the child as victor rather than victim” (p. 553). I can see how Deasy would arrive at this interpretation given