Eric Santner, Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago (he also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Judaic Studies) gave the Kohut Memorial Lecture after the luncheon at the 2003 International Psychology of the Self Conference. I was most impressed with his lecture and decided to ask to meet with him later that month. I was particularly interested in drawing him out further about some of the possible implications for his work as it pertains to Self Psychology. What follows is an excerpt from the conversation we had in my office that day.

Santner, whose book is sub-titled, "Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig" (a German-Jewish theologian), maintains that Freud's negative assessment of religion was partly based upon his view that monotheism leads to intolerance. That is, the violent legacy of monotheism promoted the notion of scarcity and competition - bolstering the idea of counter- or "false" religions. However, Santner believes that Freud's theory of psychoanalysis, when integrated with Rosenzweig's ideas, actually "inaugurated an openness to alterity - or the uncanny strangeness of the other" - which, while seeming to be paradoxical, serves to promote tolerance. He emphasized that a true spirit of tolerance is actually based on alterity, which is the opposite of communality: that is, the strangeness of others to oneself is also based on the idea of being a stranger to oneself. Therefore, while the implication of cultural pluralism is that "you are just like me", the implication of alterity is that "not everyone is like me." Every familiar is thus ultimately strange. Therefore, cultural pluralism may actually be "a defense against the presence of the other" and thus "neighborliness". Alterity may then be seen to be a basis for tolerance. Perhaps another way to express this is that tolerance is actually constructed within a transitional or potential space in which a sense of alterity and communality exist in dynamic tension - a space which is inherently unstable and thus is continuously collapsing and being reconstructed - thus a sense of "neighborliness" can emerge within this potential space (although I am not sure that Professor Santner would agree).

Santner then extends this argument further by suggesting that "the psychotheology of everyday life involves an 'answerability to my neighbor with an unconscious'." The unconscious ways in which we either avoid or take on this task is also our own defense "against aliveness to the world and its possibilities." He believes that theological language can even seem more adequate to express our experience of life and utilizes Rosenzweig's ideas - especially those contained in his masterwork, Star of Redemption, to illustrate this (these ideas are far more complex than I can ever attempt to do justice to in this brief report or maybe ever, although I bought the book and struggled to get through it!). Santner believes Rosensweig's notion of neighborliness encompasses a "sense of belovedness that seems to push us into other thinking and that experience of proximity to the other "is divine". It is this experience of belovedness that "is beyond object cathexis" and "allows for an uncoupling of drive from destiny".

The reader may be wondering at this point, "What does all this have to do with Self Psychology?" I would respond that Eric Santner's reworking and integration of Freud's concepts with those of Rosenzweig would have resonance for all psychoanalysts - and not just for those with a theological bent. Much of our conversation focused upon the implications that his work holds for psychopathology and therapeutic action. While Santner's work is steeped in the language of drive theory, then filtered through theology, I found much of his reasoning to be rather consistent with a notion of therapeutic action as implied by selfobject theory as well as intersubjectivity.

Santner critiqued Strachey's translation of triebeshicksal as drive (triebe) only rather than as drive-destiny, which is the actual meaning of triebeshicksal. (Strachey's use of instinct within this context was similarly problematic.) This meaning suggests that a drive could have an alternative destiny - that a drivenness could be replaced through analysis with a sense of movement towards this destiny. I believe that Winnicott would call this sense of destiny an expression of the "True Self" and that Kohut would view this alternative destiny as moving towards the fulfillment of an individual's "Life Arc". Santner stated that he viewed "psychoanalysis as a technique of encounter (that leads to) an uncoupling of drive from destiny . . . to be in proximity to the other so that a new destiny emerges." "Perhaps the only true neighbor is found in analysis", he mused.

Santner views the process of analysis as "de-animating the undeadness" that results from analyzing the "disruptive core of fantasy" that results in domination by a neurotic drivenness. Self-psychologists can readily resonate with this idea by considering Kohut's notion of the revitalization of the self through the analytic encounter. Santner's work speaks to the process of treatment in which a developmental process that has been derailed through insufficient or faulty selfobject responsiveness may continue as a result of an encounter with a new self-selfobject experience. Santner noted that "to be in the presence of another is an achievement" and that psychoanalysis increases one's capacity for such an achievement. This view is not inconsistent with Benjamin's notion of mutual recognition which is also a developmental achievement in that a sense of oneself as subject and a sense of the other as subject gradually emerges; experiences within a given selfobject matrix may either facilitate or hinder this development. Santner also reflected upon the perhaps paradoxical idea that "one needs a considerable act of integration to break down without falling apart", i.e. a capacity to tolerate regression - including within the analytic encounter. Of course, most self-psychologists (as well as those analysts influenced by theorists of the British middle school) would agree that this is a capacity that can be developed within the context of the analysis, which is one of the reasons that these psychoanalytic models are thought to have extended the possibilities that psychoanalysis offers to a broader patient population.

In conclusion, I would like to suggest that an understanding of Santner's work might also serve to help end some of the "institutional and theoretical monotheism" that plagues Self Psychology - as well as psychoanalysis itself - today.