The Self Concept since James From I and Me Toward We

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2010

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2009

This article traces four shifts in conceptualization marking the theoretical/clinical journey of this author's developmental movement from a self psychologist to a selves-inrelationship psychoanalyst. It commences with a recognition that the analyst's conceptualizations, building blocks of organizing activity, are actions that impact self and other. Psychoanalysis was initiated as a practice in open-systems thinking, the hallmark of scientific observation and meaning making. Continuing in this tradition requires careful attention to clinical experiences anomalous to what a particular conceptualization might lead one to expect or to how that conceptualization might inform one's response. Such anomalous experiences, as Kohut demonstrated, can require expansion or emendation in conceptualization as central to the analyst's clinical activity. Four key concepts emerging in the self-psychological tradition are revisited for conceptual expansion: mirroring, self, attunement, and rupture repair. Each reformulation impacts on and is constituted, in part, by the other, hence the nonlinear relationship between these concepts. Each reformulation is grounded in a clinical illustration and marks a shift from structural conceptualization to process conceptualization characterized by attention to, and narration of, the analyst's as well as the analysand's subjective experience and contribution to the clinical interaction. Furthermore, clinical attention is expanded to the micro dimensions of nonsymbolic-embodied experiences and the macro dimensions of how different cultural beliefs and customs, shaped by both local as well as professional identifications, can influence the meaning-making process of the analyst's subjective organizations of self, other, and intersubjective processes. In the clinical illustrations narrated, these reconceptualizations are demonstrated to have significant impact on how analyst and analysand interact.

2021

The linguistic duality of self as a pronoun of the first and third person is related to alternative ways of categorizing people either as self versus other (SO categorization) or as objects conceived in the third person (3P categorization). Research is reviewed showing that these

Frontiers in Psychology, 2014

This paper pursues the general intention of working toward integrating the disparate literature about self and fitting them into psychological thinking so as to clarify what a self is in clinical, applied and scientific practice. The question is whether there is anything that can be called a self that has an ontological status, or whether what we refer to as self is simply a linguistic way of indexing one's location in the various kinds of spaces one can be said to virtually inhabit: the political space that identifies whether we are liberal or conservative; the economic space concerning how we are engaged; the social space specific to any one or a group of people as a friend or enemy; and on. The term self occurs ubiquitously in our thinking and communications as a reference, but also there is more. Beyond linguistic and cognitive referencing there is an adherence of individual identity, the reflective individual act, and there is the self-other relationship. An examination of Donald Winnicott, the reflections of Charles Larmore, and other investigations may offer ways of thinking about and conceptualizing the self that fits with psychological practice and science. It may, then, give a glimpse of a beginning platform in which the variety of ways we use the term self in psychology can be made transparent and evolve a coherent way of thinking about and using self concepts that will sharpen the way we engage in psychological discourse and influence practice. In any event, this is a beginning of an investigation of a way of handling the complexities of self and self-concepts that psychologists may find interesting if not useful.

International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 2017