Chapter 3 Response to Fosshage

I appreciate Dr. James Fosshage's thoughtful and challenging discussion and want to briefly respond to his main criticism: that the idea of compensatory structure is misleading, possibly acting as an interference with the main analytic objective—the formation of “primary structure” and establishment of a fully healthy, fully vitalized self. However, before turning to this area of major disagreement, I want to emphasize that Fosshage and I are in essential agreement on many points that are basic to self psychology and to my argument, as well as his: “structure” is simply one of a number of possible metaphors, a shorthand, that denotes a whole array of capacities, organizing patterns, defenses, and motivational/direction-setting intrapsychic configurations; vitalizing mirroring experiences that enhance self-esteem development are integral to the idealizing dimension of self—selfobject experience, and an idealizing component is integral to mirroring and twinship experiences; “structural deficits” are not “empty spaces” or holes to be filled “in” (for some the structural metaphor is taken literally and reified as a concretized version of the self as an empty inner space); and deficits, persisting, intensified needs, and defensive measures that protect the self become persisting modes and motivations that shape “primary structures” and are part and parcel of the self organization.

Fosshage sees my example of the mirroring affirmation Anna Freud experienced with a woman she felt was her twin as an illustration of the restoration of a fully healthy, vitalized self via the formation of “primary” structure. However, my claim is far more modest (the same is