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represents an ideal, is the ability to “stand in the spaces” between self-states or as he puts it: “the ability to feel like one self while being many” (p. 274). Stephen Mitchell (1991) also views the self as “multiple and discontinuous”, consisting of a collection of self-states akin to internalized object relationships. However he also emphasizes that people have a distinct sense of a private self with a clear boundary between ourselves and others. He explains this apparent contradiction by noting that each definition refers to a different aspect of self. For Mitchell the “multiple self” is the self as action, i.e. “multiple configurations of self patterned variability in different relational contexts” (p. 139), while the private, unitary self is: a “subjective experience of the pattern making itself, activity that is experienced over time and across the different organizational schemes [and] is recognized as ‘mine, my particular way of processing and shaping experience” (p. 139). While more traditional views of the self (e.g. Freud, Klein, Winnicott) might be seen as vertically organized with the more defensively constructed, socially adapted parts on the surface covering the less acceptable, at times unconscious parts underneath, contemporary relational/interpersonal theorists favor a horizontal model. As Donell Stern (2010) puts it: “Mind here is not a vertical organization of conscious and unconscious, but horizontally organized collection of self-states , each in dynamic relation to the others” (p. 139). Perhaps the most radical expression of a contemporary interpersonal approach to the self is seen in the work of Edgar A. Levenson (1972, 1991) who makes a strong case for the absolute inextricability of self and other and thus views analyst and patient as inevitably and unconsciously involved with one another in highly affectively charged ways. Levenson is relentlessly post-modern in his conviction that any attempt to define or explain anything about a person is only a perspective (e.g. of a person, an interaction, an experience) and as such may likely be defensively organized to exclude other perspectives that may contain other essential aspects of a person and their experience. Thus he views psychoanalytic concepts such as the “self” as reifications of something inescapably fluid that can only be seen in “process” or “context”. Levenson’s self, like Sullivan’s self-system, consists of the variety of strategies we employ to negotiate the dangers of our interpersonal world. Thus in an attempt to make sense of the world, people develop schemata which if they work, tend to be reused. For Levenson, the relative rigidity or flexibility of these schemata may be a way of describing psychopathology. He believes that the need to continuously adapt to an ever-changing set of circumstances has resulted in the development of a mind that functions as a self-organizing system (Levenson, Hirsch, and Iannuzzi, 2005, p. 612). Levenson acknowledges, “… there is something autonomous within the person organizing, experiencing, using it and taking it away, and reorganizing it.” (p. 613). Thus Levenson thinks of the self as a process rather than a structure.
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