Chapter 9 Pathognomic Mirroring and the Organization of Experience: A Developmental Factor in Self Pathology

The “different baby” of self psychology is born with a harmonious and vigorous self (Tolpin, 1984), dependent on continuing, optimally sustaining selfobject experiences from birth to death. The centrality of the concept of self and the individual's requirement for attuned responsiveness provides the basis for a uniform, encompassing theory of psychological development in both health and pathology. More severe psychopathology results from repeated, traumatically unattuned disturbances in selfobject experiences during earliest development leaving structural deficits in the self. Defensive structures emerge in response to these structural deficits as perservative attempts at balancing a precariously cohesive or distorted sense of self. The selfobject matrix for the developing child forms a mutually influencing affective field, culminating in the self's organization of experience which cannot be empathically comprehended beyond the field's subjective boundaries. The central focus remains the experiencing self as distinct from interaction with objects that do not function at that moment as selfobjects; that is, they do not function to sustain the self.

As development proceeds, selfobject experiences provide the specific affective and cognitive coloration characteristic of the organization of experience of the individual. Structuralizations of self-experience