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Self psychology: Today
(2002)
In this commentary it is appreciated that in his approach Safran avoids some of the common pitfalls of brief therapy discourses, namely, the extremes of therapeutic grandiosity and therapeutic nihilism. Instead, seeking to maintain a >middle way,< he strives to balance the pragmatic and instrumental aims of time-limited psychotherapy with an appreciation of the existential and human dimensions of the therapeutic encounter. Safran also works to extend the full implications of relational theory to the theory and practice of brief psychotherapy. In this effect he relies on the contributions of constructivism, interpersonal psychoanalytic theory, and relational clinical theory. In this commentary some tensions and even contradictions are remarked upon between certain aspects of Safran's approach and the fundamental assumptions of relational theory. A tension is noted between the instrumental aims of brief therapy and Safran's goal of radical openness to patients. The importance of therapist decentering is acknowledged, along with paradoxes in the use of the concept of metacommunication. Finally, a question is raised as to the compatibility of empirically oriented approaches to psychotherapy research with the philosophical assumptions of a two-person psychology.
In discussing the complexities and dialectical tensions inherent in the relational point of view, this commentary seeks to alert the reader to the simplifying dichotomies that can lead theory and clinical practice to be hostage to ideology. In exploring those dichotomies and their problematic implications for our work, emphasis is placed particularly on the nature of what constitutes evidence for our formulations and conclusions the different blind spots that different epistemological positions are designed to alert us to or, at least partially, to overcome the ways in which our efforts to transcend those blind spots often themselves create new blind spots the relation between insight and new relational experience the ambiguities associated with the (highly important but at times conceptually perilous) distinction between the one-person and the two-person models and the tensions between the need to hear patients in a fashion that is affirming and accepting and the equally important need to hear their fervent wish to change what they also want to have accepted. Many of these tensions and complexities are examined in the context of a critique of Bion's claim that analysts should be >without memory or desire.<
There has been little or no research on the establishment of infant moods or the mechanisms underlying them. One reason may be our difficulty in entertaining the idea that there are affective processes in infants that have long-lasting organizing continuous effects. It is this possibility that is considered in this paper. I attempt to address the questions of how moods are created and what some of their functions are. My model of moods is that infants have long-lasting (e.g., hours, days, and even longer) mood states. Mood states are dynamically changing yet distinct assemblages of affective behaviors. Mood control processes are modified by affective input from others. Thus moods are cocreated by the interplay of active, self-organized, biorhythmic affective control processes in the infant and the effect of the emotions expressed by others on mood control processes. In recognition of the importance of Sander's thinking to this work, I have named one of these processes the Sanderian Affective Wave. Mood states organize behavior and experience over time. Critically, moods serve an anticipatory representational function by providing directionality to an infant's behavior as he >moves< into the future. Thus they provide continuity to infants' experiential life. Furthermore, moods fulfill the Janus principle of bringing the past into the future for the infant, but as a noncognitive/symbolic/linguistic process – that is, as a purely affective–memorial process. Moreover, I believe that consideration of the development of moods opens the way for thinking about dynamic conflictual emotional processes in infants. Lastly, thinking about moods has important implications for understanding the development of pathology and for therapy.