Response to Orange, Lachmann, Shane, and Ipp

Abstract

In her discussion of my article, Hazel Ipp emphasizes how risky it can be to uncover and examine ghosts that haunt our theories and our admired theorists. While followers can feel wounded, their idealizations fragmented, there is the “potential to open space, to amplify reflective capacities … and extend our thinking …” In their discussions, both Estelle Shane and Hazel Ipp emphasize the ways in which their thinking has been expanded in reading my article. Conversely, I believe that Donna Orange and Frank Lachmann find my article wounding. According to Orange, I have discredited self psychology’s “beloved grandfather.” I maintain that once a theorist is considered a beloved grandfather, any form of critical understanding of him or his theory constitutes betrayal, apostasy—a problematic position for any school of thought, particularly one founded in an empathic listening mode. For Lachmann, I have inadvertently opened up his own traumatic Holocaust experience, one that he has sought to deny through maintaining that it is only a former concentration camp inmate who can “be described as a survivor of the trauma of the Holocaust.” I argue that such denial is precisely what haunts our field to its detriment.

Keywords:

• analyst’s experience
• Holocaust
• Kohut
• theory construction
• trauma

Notes

¹ See my On the Shoulders of Women: The Feminization of Psychotherapy (Philipson, 1993) to see how I have previously connected psychoanalytic theory construction to its social-historical context.

² Thomas Kohut quoted in Kuriloff (2014), p. 12.