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PAUL Ornstein accepted the significance of the cohesion producing phenomena as relevant to the clinical moment with any patient so does not see any difficulty with Joe's integration proposals. He asked, however, for further clarity in the clinical material so that it can be demonstrated how the interventions are not in contradiction to the broader selfobject transferences within which that particular motivational system emerges. Once the interventions are clearly seen to relate to the subjective moment he would anticipate no difficulty. But he felt that some of the clinical examples did not demonstrate that so clearly. He was not demanding perfection, but a trend, some consensually validatable [data confirming the above stated principle.]
JOE Lichtenberg (interrupts) to make a quick statement on this point. i.e. about the attention to selfobject dimension of experience while exploring other motivational issues and associated problems. Through the concept of foreground-background dimensions of the transference he felt that the clinical vignette of Susan Lazar accounted for the selfobject transference. He and his colleagues believed that the selfobject transference existed in the background in that material, akin to the "holding environment" of Winnicott. If it had been disturbed it would have had to have been attended to. But, in the foreground was another issue, the exploratory-assertiveness problem. this problem was a "pathological accommodation" she had made which had to be investigated in order to get joint shared awareness and the benefits that ensue from that joint shared awareness. This was Joe's answer to Paul's concern about the clinical material provided. "Of course it is there [the selfobject dimension of the relationship] but the analyst has to make a distinction, in that clinical situation, between the background which did not require attention at that moment, and the foreground which definitely required attention at that moment.
BOB Stolorow at this point raised another possible point of integration. He asked Joe if he would agree that the specific foreground-background or figure-ground relationships which form are a function of the ongoing intersubjective field (ISF).
JOE completely agreed.
PAUL then entered this discussion with a comment from Anna and his critique of the foreground-background concept in the absence of specifying the motivating moment. What happens in the Intersubjective Context- if you like that term better (general laughter) which makes one or the other come to the foreground. (laughter continues)
JOE: If we start using each other words!
PAUL: You now acknowledge that it is not an automatic movement back and forth, It was never clear in the past.
BOB: It was never clear from our writing, Paul? Nobody ever listens to me!
Marion Tolpin (Chicago): It is not a question of should we, or can we, integrate theory. We are doing it. Each generation needs "live teachers" who take the theory and run with it and put their own spin on it. I will suggest to the program committee for next year what we consider a way of continuing this discussion. (Applause.)
Max Sucharov (Vancouver) asks for comment about his suggestion that the three theories can be integrated under a general systems concept. Max raises two points in his argument.
1. Recognizing selfobject needs in all adult relationships including the therapist, we place the self-selfobject relationship in a system of mutual reciprocal influence.
2. The articulation by the intersubjective theory of the self-delineating selfobject relationship, implicitly recognizes the self-selfobject relationship as the primary one which generates, organizes and maintains experience.
Bernard Brandschaft (Los Angeles) offers two comments.
1. If it is possible that the self-selfobject attachment experience is but one form of primary attachment experience, then I would like to raise the possibility that a different form of attachment experience, one significantly present in people with traumatic attachment experience, is more clinically significant. For these people the problem is not the self-selfobject tie and the failing selfobject. For them it is the developmental and clinical fact that in their attachment experience, pathological structure was laid down. This is not the same as missing structure. This pathological structure becomes the nucleus of the experience of the self.
2. I am in disagreement with Bob about a certain point and I want to raise this issue which emerges from my own experience. I want to take issue that all aversive experiences emerge from a present intersubjective context. In my view their is a dynamic interplay between the primary structures that are laid down and those that are being experienced in the present intersubjective context. Only investigation can determine what that dynamic interplay may be.
PAUL: Bernie Brandschaft's comments seem related to Anna's and my writing on defensive structures. Perhaps we will begin to read each other's papers now. I am pleased that the self-selfobject matrix is now included in the literature as I have seen it over this weekend, unlike the past 2-3 years.
BOB: Max.'s idea of placing self psychology in a broader general systems theory is a good one and I have made use of some of his ideas. I do not agree with his second idea about the self-delineating selfobject. I may not have understood it clearly. I believe that what dimension of experience, or to use Joe Lichtenberg's terms, what motivational system is primary at any moment will be constituted by the unique interplay of subjectivities at that moment. I am very reluctant to make categorical universal statements about any particular thing always being primary.
I agree entirely with Bernie Brandschaft's first statement about other important dimensions of attachment besides the selfobject one, including the one he has written so usefully about, the dimension of pathological accommodation and the attachments formed on that basis. I did not understand the second comment. Your use of the term "intersubjective context" (ISC) implies that it leaves out the contribution of the subject and the subject's organizing principles, the subject's pathological accommodations etc.
The ISC includes the very thing you were identifying: the structuralized principles that each subject brings to any intersubjective encounter are included, by definition, in the concept of an ISC.
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