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Two quotes from important recent books set the tone for my reflections. In A Fresh Look at Psychoanalysis: The View from Self Psychology, Goldberg (1988) writes: “[the] pressing need is to go beyond the commonplace and to struggle with advancing self psychology…. Kohut … hoped for a multitude of investigative efforts to fill out his ideas, to push them further, to challenge and modify them” (p. xviii). In Psychoanalytic Treatment: An Intersubjective Approach, Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood (1987) state that the assumption of an inevitably tripartite structure for the self
unnecessarily narrows the vast array of selfobject experiences that can shape and color the evolution of a person's self organization. We suspect that a great variety of selfobject functions and corresponding structural configurations of the self remain yet to be discovered by analysts whose empathic-introspective efforts are guided by differently situated points of view [p. 20].
Guided by an empathic effort to sense the emergent experience of self of the infant and by an empathic-introspective effort to follow shifting motivations in the clinical situation, I have proposed five motivational systems from which discrete transferences evolve (Lichtenberg, 1989). Each system develops from an innate program in response to a basic need, and each involves particular affects. One system develops in response to the psychic regulation of physiological