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From: Jule P. Miller III
Date: 20 Apr 1997
Time: 02:45:37
I agree with Dr. Wolf's ideas. In fact, I believe that there are normal periods of fragmentation during development that allow the child's growing self-structure to reorganize. The "terrible twos" are one such stage as is adolescence. I disagree with one of the other commentators that optimal frustration is only important in therapy and not in life. Advesarial selfobject functions such as limit setting are crucial in child rearing and are usually experienced by the child as frustrating. Growth, I believe, proceeds in a window between optimal frustration and optimal gratification (or responsiveness). Optimal frustration, or therapeutic disruption, is also important in another way - it spurs the patient on to take a part in creating their own self-structure, in reaction to the therapist rather than through a mutual affective attunement. This shifts the focus of self structuralization from the Need For Others (the classic selfobject needs Kohut described so well), to the Will To Do (effectence). It is at that moment that the patient creates a new meaning to explain and bind his fragmented experience. This new meaning takes the form of a fantasy that serves to integrate and organize the experience of disruption and the resulting fragmentation products. I call these fantasies secondary selfobjects and the resulting self structure secondary selfstructure. Of course, when I introduced the concept of organizing fantasies just now I departed from Dr. Wolf's model. But I believe that fantasy formation is a central part of self structuralization and that it has not been included enough in present theory. Further, I believe that we tend to focus too heavily on what we as therapists do to alter the patient's self structure and not enough on the patient's own Will To Do. This inner drive to reach out and affect the world is just as central to humanity as is the need to be affectively attuned to. After becoming aware of this it is easy to recognize the interplay of our Need For Others and our Will To Do. I discuss all of this at greater length in my book Using Self Psychology In Child Psychotherapy (1996, Aronson).