Reply to Polly Young‐Eisendrath

Abstract

When Young-Eisendrath finds the concept of Self to consist in four abstract principles, namely, coherence, continuity, agency or efficacy, and affective relational patterns (Young-Eisendrath 1997a, pp. 162-3), she condenses Jung's understanding of Self into an abstract generality. But an abstract generality is nobody in particular. What, then, makes somebody a particular individual? A generality does not create a particularity, nor does it heal. In saying this I was telling how Young-Eisendrath's concept of Self as she presents it in an article is inadequate. I was not referring to her analytical work.With regard to the dreams, Young-Eisendrath does not believe in the presence of a 'wise teacher' who is neither the analyst nor the analysand. She says nothing about the 'double intentionality' I describe at some length in my essay, using Husserl's sense of the phrase. She does not seem to accept -or to find it important -that a mutuality exists in an individual subject, as ground for other relations of mutuality over a lifetime, even as ground for an analytical relation, with both its transference and its countertransference. In so far as she does not accept an intentional Self, she rejects a mutuality that I find to be essential.