Response to the Commentaries

I am grateful to these commentators for having read my paper so carefully. It is of considerable interest to gain the reactions of those not steeped in psychoanalytic verbiage, and who therefore put it in perspective. In each case their comments imply a preoccupation with psychoanalysis itself, before they get on to the extensions of psychoanalytic ideas which I have attempted in the philosophical and ethical domain. It is I believe difficult to find one’s way into the analyst’s experience and the nature and quality of the evidence he brings back from his own precise setting. Travelers’ tales of old were greatly valued for their wondrousness and entertainment. But later, in the creation of the discipline of social anthropology, credulous awe gave way to critical judgment. And so the dialogue between my paper and its commentators must delve in this area of transition—to create a critical discourse out of mere psychoanalytic reportage.

It is for this reason that the comments stress questions about psychoanalysis itself, rather than what I am doing with the ideas. And for this reason I must respond largely in the same area.

Mace starts with the point that it is arbitrary on my part to pick Kleinian ideas. Other schools have equally challenging views of the “self.” The shaky self-system described by self-psychologists would seem to be a case in point. It is true that I am examining the implications of the school of psychoanalysis with which I am most familiar. Perhaps therefore I need to content myself with speaking only to Kleinians. But I would contend that none of those other possible schools offer challenges that are significantly different in content from the way I have used Kleinian ideas. In other words, the challenge that the various schools of psychoanalysis make to the philosophical notion of the discrete, coherent, and indivisible notion of the “self” are all related—though couched in different terms.

Ego-psychology in fact started up the question: How does character form and evolve. It was in that context in the 1920s and 1930s that the major lines of psychoanalytic developments diverged. In fact ego-psychologists made observations which have recently been shown to be remarkably similar to the primitive processes I have examined. I think particularly of “identification with the aggressor” (Anna Freud 1936) and “role-responsiveness” (Sandler 1976). This means that ego-psychologists have been toiling in the same backyard as Kleinians.

We can also include Winnicott’s formulation of the disturbances to the sense of self in terms of “false” and “true” selves. The false self experience is directly related to the loss of a “continuity of being” (Winnicott 1960). It is known that Winnicott was working out these ideas directly in contact with the Kleinian work on schizoid experiences in the 1950s. In turn Fairbairn and Guntrip were also addressing schizoid phenomena partly in interaction with Klein’s views. The various strands of British object-relations psychoanalysis developed their own terminology (and matrix of theory) about “self” and identity. The difference of theory has less to do with the unreliability of their observations and more to do with personal rivalries that seem inherent in the world of analyzed psychoanalysts. Parallel to this and quite independent was Helene Deutsch’s notion of the “as if” personality (Deutsch 1942), closely resembling Winnicott’s “false self” idea.

In other words there is an area of theorizing in each of the main psychoanalytic schools which derive from similar observations about the incoherence of the self. Well, Mace might still argue, it is arbitrary to take the terminology from one of them only. Though to avoid confusion one system for thinking about these observations has to be consistently applied, I am not sure that it is arbitrary to take the Kleinian one. It might be argued that the Kleinian interest in psychosis, during the period 1950–1970, entailed developing understanding of disorders of identity to a degree that outreaches (or more accurately plumbs to greater depths than) others. The steadily widening interest in the concept of projective identification (which incorporates both splitting and projection, as I used the...