Chapter 5. The Sense of a Core Self: II. Self with Other

SOMETHING of importance is missing from the last chapter. We have discussed the infant's sense of self versus other, but not the sense of self with other. There are many ways that being with an other can be experienced, including some of the most widely used clinical concepts, such as merging, fusion, a haven of safety, a security base, the holding environment, symbiotic states, self-objects, transitional phenomena, and cathected objects.

The sense of being with an other with whom we are interacting can be one of the most forceful experiences of social life. Moreover, the sense of being with someone who is not actually present can be equally forceful. Absent persons can be felt as potent and almost palpable presences or as silent abstractions, known only by trace evidence. In the mourning process, as Freud (1917) pointed out, the one who has died almost rematerializes as a presence in many different felt forms. Falling in love provides a different normal example. Lovers are not simply preoccupied with one another. The loved other is often experienced as an almost continual presence, even an aura, that can change almost everything one does—heighten one's perceptions of the world or reshape and refine one's very movements. How can experiences such as these be accounted for in