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To say that Jenkins and her patient are a well-matched pair, that they exemplify “fitting together” of self and expectable selfobject environment, is an understatement. Laura's use of language for self-expression, her dream imagery depicting changes in her self states and the direction she is trying to find with the analyst to become a self of her own, and Jenkins's exceptional presentation, permit us to participate vicariously in the analysis. I shall try to answer the panel questions via introspection and empathy with both participants in the dialogue.
The guidelines for my answers rest on the basic theoretical assumption that self psychology has set in motion a change in total attitude to the psychic work for patient and analyst. In essence, the work for each (in his or her own way) consists of trying to be in touch with, understand, and respond to the needs, strivings, motivations, expectations, and hopes of the nuclear self, to its disorder and its health, and to the forms all of these elements take in self–selfobject transferences, including any and all defensive measures to protect the self from threats to its integrity. (The transferences are mirroring, idealizing, twinship, self-delineating, adversarial, and/or mixtures of all of these, and the defensive measures are motivated by unresponded to narcissistic injuries