Panel I From Israel:
Self Psychology: A Transient Paradigm or an Infinite Potentiality?

Raanan Kulka responded to the question in this title by proposing an innovative theoretical model for self psychology that he developed with his Israeli colleagues which, he claims, involves a new potentiality for self psychology. Immersing himself in "the metaphysical parts of Kohut's legacy", mainly in Kohut's seminal article published in 1966, "Forms and Transformations of Narcissism," Kulka discovered not only a revolutionary developmental theory of narcissism, but also a whole philosophic world-view that restores the legacy of idealism into the psychoanalytic space. According to Kohut, primary narcissism is transformed into two forms : the narcissistic self and the idealized parent imago, both constituents of the self structure. But these forms in turn become transformations in its deeper meaning, "a movement from form" (structure) "to what is beyond form, a state of being beyond being, a sort of non-being being" (the transcendent). These are manifested in self experience, according to Kohut as creativity, empathy, acceptance of life's impermanence, humor and wisdom. According to Kulka, by "defining human existential condition as a natural oscillation between a narcissistic state having a quality of form, and a narcissistic state having a quality of transformation," Kohut recognized not only our psychological growth toward greatness, but also a human spiritual growth towards ideals. Kulka proposes that in The Restoration of the Self, Kohut (1977) seemed to retreat into a more structuralist position that overshadowed the psyche's transformative moves, diluting the spiritual aspect of his model. Kulka raises the possibility that the "linear development of self psychology towards the intersubjective and relational perspectives resulted in part from a disavowed distress" from not having a theoretical model explaining human transformation.

It must be clear by now that Raanan Kulka, was searching for an "idealism-motivated theory of transformation." Contrasting his particular view with American Pragmatism which, he believes, gave shape to self psychology's evolution towards the intersubjective and relational perspectives, he puts forward a new complementary model. This model is inspired in large part by Winnicott, who urged his colleagues "to be courageous enough to include the metaphysical in psychoanalysis." Kulka defines Idealism as a set of philosophies which "ascribe supreme importance to the spiritual as opposed to the material" in contrast to Pragmatism which eschews any metaphysical meaning to thoughts, ideas and views.

By introducing an "emergence-dissolving" model, which he illustrated with powerfully evocative clinical examples, Kulka attempts to restore the 1966 Kohutian paradigm to its full heuristic value and to expand it into a contemporary existential self psychology model. He takes exception to the later Kohutian bipolar self model by stating that "the idealism component of the human self is not a form of narcissism, but, on the contrary, the sine qua non element for the transformation of narcissism into supra-states of the human spirit." Therefore, in this self-selfhood conceptualization, human existence would be in a " constant transition between a finite immanent being", called here emergence -a formative state of things-, " and an infinite transcendent non-being", called dissolving -the transformative state of things. This movement between these two self needs, emergence and dissolving, would be the " organic transition between self and selfhood, between the ontological entitlement for individual existence and the ethical choice of responsibility for the Other."

Finally, Kulka's basic hypothesis for this emerging-dissolving model restores the empathic selfobject matrix as the "potential web out of which every thing emerges, and to which every thing dissolves, in order to emerge from it again". The need for emerging is materialized within an empathic mirroring selfobject experience, and the need for dissolving can only take place within a matrix of idealized selfobject by making possible the transcendence of individual existence.

One of the powerful clinical vignettes offered by Kulka that he called "A Woman and an Ambulance," illustrates the movement between emergence and dissolving, as well as between trauma and recovery. One day, a young woman, in analysis for several years, suddenly gets up from the couch and stands motionless facing the window. She ignores her analyst's inquiries but repeats this behavior over and over until one day Kulka asks, "Is it the ambulance?". She nods in agreement. This young woman's husband had died on the battle field because he could not be evacuated after being injured in combat. After several months of repeating her ritual she says, "It is impossible to go on living when someone else is fighting for their life, or has died just now. There is no meaning for private life." Having exhausted all his attempts at genetic and dynamic interpretations, Kulka joined her in her solemn muteness whenever the ambulance siren sounds. As he meditated in his chair while she stands one day, he imagined the ambulance and the people in it, and felt a "great deepening of my emotions of empathy and compassion". He got up from his chair and stood next to his patient facing the window, as he did from then on, until one day, hearing the siren sound, she said quietly : "I no longer need to stand up." Kulka concludes that "an event of dissolving occurred" by their joint suspension of their individual lives and the removal of separateness between them, and between them and their Others, until this "ethical experience" of supra-individual existence of participation in the world reached a point of saturation and his patient "could return to the private, individual, existence of emergence".

Kulka concluded his presentation by linking Emmanuel Levinas' philosophical ethical position for an infinite responsibility to the Other as foundational of human existence, with Kohut's understanding of the self-selfhood process made possible only by the transformative self-state of empathy, a dissolving state of mind. He calls on us as therapists to nurture the "capability of dissolving" which makes possible our mobilization "into a mirroring state for the patient's emergence, or into an ideal state for the patient's dissolving".

Shlomit Haber Mosheiov and Donna Orange discussed Kulka's challenging presentation. Entitled "Open, Close, Open", Haber Mosheiov's discussion, in an evocative poetic style, displayed her deep understanding and resonance to Kulka's model. Starting with the "extraordinary ability of the infant to be empathic towards its mother" as a manifestation of our " primal open nature, " she proposes along with Kulka, that we have a nuclear design for this existential vibration between an open transpersonal consciousness of beyond being, and a closed state of consciousness of coming into being . "Open, closed, open. That's all we are." quoting a Yehuda Amichai's poem. She weaves her understanding of this "primary essential nature" through her explanation of the ruptured souls of our patients by the traumatic injury to their empathic consciousness, and through her descriptions of the "open-enough therapeutic presence" required for reinstating their primary open nature, as illustrated by Raanan's stories. She thanked Raanan for his contribution "to help liberate our intuitive greatness, perhaps through the belief that our empathic stands will carry us to our destination."

Donna Orange's discussion, entitled "Standing at the Window", was another display of her immense talent as a partner in dialogue. Inspired by Levinas, she recognized a kindred spirit in Kulka's clinical stories in which he displayed, according to her, a fundamental self psychological spirit of "standing at the window with the patient." Revisiting Levinas' tragic story, she contextualized this philosopher's strong assertion that "ethics is first philosophy, where ethics is understood as a radically asymmetrical relation of infinite responsibility to the other person" ( Simon Critchley), more fundamental than metaphysics, ontology or epistemology. However, she disagreed with Kulka's definition of Idealism as "a claim about what is fundamentally real, about what things are basically made up of." She believes that Kohut's idealism "was not ontological" nor metaphysical, not concerned with what is fundamentally real. He was devoted to personal and ethical ideals which brought him to rethink psychoanalytic practice and theory, even building "a major part of his self psychology around idealizing as a developmental process." Trying to better understand Kulka's concept of dissolving, she senses that it might be related "to the Levinasian ethic of minimal subjectivity" in which the primacy of the Other's face dissolves any strong I-ness; and she raises a critical question to Kulka : "Does the other's uniqueness dissolve as well?" Finally, to the question raised by the title of this panel, she answers that, for her, self psychology is always both a transient paradigm and an infinite potentiality. She calls us to "release our grip on our transient paradigms, and embrace the infinite possibilities and ideals that Heinz Kohut left to us."