Abstract
The enormous contribution of David Shapiro to our understanding of personality and of clinical phenomena arose in the context of a psychoanalytic world that was largely dominated by what has now come to be called the one-person point of view. In this chapter, I will reexamine Shapiro’s contribution from the vantage point of the two-person, intersubjective viewpoint that has emerged as a central contribution of psychoanalytic thought in recent decades.
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A parallel devaluing was directed toward the events and experiences of daily life, rendering them too, through the lens of traditional psychoanalytic thought, as relatively “superficial” and leading to a tendency, prevalent to this day, for many analysts – even relational analysts (see Wachte2008) – to pay insufficient attention to the impact and the dynamics of daily life.
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I refer to the “clinical and observational” impetus, because there were also abstractly theoretical sources, stemming from the contradiction between defenses being seen as belonging to the System Cs/Pcs since they defended that system against the Unconscious, yet also, by the logic of the same topographic theory, belonging to the System Ucs, since they were dynamically unconscious.
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I will have more to say shortly about the relation between Erikson’s ideas and Shapiro’s. The affinities between Shapiro’s ideas and Erikson’s are even more obvious than those between Shapiro and Horney. Shapiro had direct contact with Erikson at Austen Riggs, and Erikson, of course, was a leading figure in the ego psychology movement out of which Shapiro’s ideas evolved. I had originally intended to include a section in this chapter on the relation between their ideas, but in fact the section got too long to include, and I will have to discuss this topic elsewhere.
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Mitchell’s earlier book, in collaboration with Jay Greenberg, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Greenberg and Mitchell 1983) could at most be said to be a proto-relational work or a precursor of the relational point of view.
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At times I have said to patients some variant of “you have to be a little more ‘not like yourself’ in order to be yourself.” This has usually been in response to the patient noticing some variation on his or her own but saying either that other people don’t think of it as the way he/she is or commenting on some such feeling as “I like it when I can be like this, but it doesn’t feel quite like me.” I am likely at such points to encourage the patient’s experimentation with these “not like me” parts of himself, with comments that include that it still feels new and strange but will feel more and more “me-like” as he feels his way into it, especially if he senses that it is a way of expressing a part of himself that has previously been a source of anxiety or discomfort and hence has been submerged.
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Wachtel, P.L. (2011). Personality in Context: Reflections on the Contributions of David Shapiro. In: Piers, C. (eds) Personality and Psychopathology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6214-0_2
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