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Heinz Kohut in his summarizing reflections at the 1981 Berkeley Self Psychology Conference returned to an image that must have been one of his favorites. In discussing one of the many dimensions of empathy, the concept that he placed at the center of his work, he recalled the reaction of the astronauts as they were forced, by a malfunction of their spaceship, to choose between leaving the earth's orbit and forever circling the universe, or returning to earth to what was sure to be a fiery death. Kohut recounted that the astronauts' decision was instantaneous: return to earth and a certain death rather than circle endlessly in the dark void off infinity. His point was at once simple and profound: human beings even in death prefer being surrounded by a human silence and a human darkness rather than by a nonhuman, meaningless void. It is here that we find a fitting symbol for one of the two major aspects of alterego selfobject phenomena: a need for sameness in which the individual is stripped of any personal ambition or need for the all-powerful other and experiences himself as embedded in a human sameness, a sameness that both in life and in death binds us together.
To introduce the other major aspect of alterego phenomena, I would like to utilize a second reference to outer space, or rather, to the world presented to us in Steven Spielberg's block buster movie E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. There is much in this movie for the self-psychology-informed viewer to ponder. We see the all-too-common phenomenon in suburban America, a 10–year-old child, Elliot, growing up in a family characterized by a harried, overworked mother and the recent departure of his father. E.T., the extra-terrestrial then arrives, surely symbolizing the regressively transformed inner experience of the boy. Rather than experiencing himself as a joyful, growing child, Elliot feels like a charming yet ugly being, left by a cruel fate on a distant planet, far from his own kind. Remember E.T.'s overridin