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feeling of an inner core of self was a narcissistically invested fiction. In fact, Sullivan viewed human beings as having “as many personalities as they have interpersonal relations” (1950, p 221). For him, our selves were divided into the “good-me”, that which I like about myself, the “bad-me”, that which I dislike, and the “not-me”, aspects of self so anxiety-provoking that they need to be disavowed by means of dissociation. Sullivan’s view of the self as multiple along with his invocation of self-preservative dissociative processes has forming the leading edge of contemporary relational views of the self best exemplified in the work of Philip Bromberg (1998, 2006, 2011) and Donnell Stern (1997, 2010). Sullivan developed the concept of the “self-system” to elucidate the configuration of personality traits and security operations designed to maintain an individual’s relative sense of safety and stability. This “self-system” is designed to protect a person from undo shame and anxiety by employing mechanisms such as dissociation and selective inattention. Sullivan’s emphasis on the “other” as a source of danger is consonant with contemporary interpersonal, two person psychology perspectives. Following in the Sullivanian tradition of a field theory perspective, Bromberg ( 1998) views the mind as “a configuration of shifting, non-linear states of consciousness in an ongoing dialectic with the necessary illusion of unitary selfhood.” (p. 7). Following Sullivan, Bromberg (1998, 2006, 2011) sees “not-me” experiences as ubiquitous and inevitable and claims that dissociative processes can be a healthy, adaptive function of the human mind serving a primary self-protective function akin to Freud’s repression , or Sullivan’s self-system . Thus for Bromberg, “the self” is definitionally a collection of “me” and disavowed “not me” states. As some degree of dissociation is inevitable, Bromberg emphasizes that it is the degree of dissociation amongst the self-states that determines the level of psychopathology with the most extreme examples constituting psychotic experiences. The contemporary relational field theory view of the self has implications for understanding interactions. For Bromberg and other contemporary relational thinkers (e.g. D.B. Stern, E. Levenson) an interaction between two selves involves a complex, ever shifting interweaving of both conscious and unconscious elements that affect and are affected by one another. For Bromberg, successful treatment involves the recognition of these dissociated self- states as they are enacted in the analytic relationship so that they can be re-organized by the patient. Bromberg (1998) views health as the capacity of our multiple self-states to access one another, unhampered by defensively determined dissociative processes. This capacity, which 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
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