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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.
VI. FURTHER AND CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENTS OF THE CONCEPT OF THE SELF SPECIFIC TO EUROPE
VI. A. Contemporary British Object Relations Contribution Christopher Bollas has written extensively on the concept of self, its origin, its articulation, the sense of self. He is influenced by Winnicott’s concept the “true self” and has elaborated in a unique way. In his writing in this area he often refers to literature, poetry and arts. In Forces of Destiny (1989) Bollas writes: When Winnicott introduced the term ‘true self’ to stand for an inherited potential that found its expression in spontaneous action, I think he conceptualized a
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