Knox - Self-agency in psychotherapy : attachment, autonomy, and intimacy

PART I
The Relational, Developmental, and Neurobiological Foundations of Self-Agency

PART II
Clinical Aspects of Self-Agency

I AM GRATEFUL TO A NUMBER OF PEOPLE who have helped me at crucial stages in writing this book. The invitation from Allan Schore and Deborah Malmud to write a book on self-agency enabled me to see that it would fill a significant gap in the psychotherapy literaturethat it is a book whose time has come. My many discussions with colleagues who are researching in related fields have been invaluable in enabling me to widen the scope of my study and to include the relevant articles from other disciplines. I would particularly like to thank James Astor, Joe Cambray, Linda Carter, Warren Colman, Sue Gerhardt, George Hogenson, Georgia Lepper, John Merchant, and Jo Tucker, who have all contributed greatly to my understanding of the theoretical issues and their clinical applications that I explore in this book. Pramila Bennett has been a very great help in preparing the book for publication. All of these have also offered constant friendship and support, for which I am always grateful. My thanks to Vani Kannan and the Norton team.

I am also grateful to Beatrice Beebe, Peter Fonagy, Raya Jones, Jaak Panksepp, Bruce Reis, Oliver Turnbull, and Vittorio Gallese for their helpful comments on some of the ideas explored in this book or on draft chapters, or for helping me to locate relevant articles. I would also like to thank Nadia Fina, Brett Kahr, Jane Ryan, Steven Flower, Massimo Giannoni, Andrew Samuels, and Caterina Vezzoli for offering me opportunities to present my ideas to clinical colleagues in seminars and conferences, occasions that provide useful feedback and opportunities to revise and refine my ideas. I am also grateful to my patients who have given their permission for the case illustrations in the book.

I am also very grateful to Helen Campbell-Hart for permission to use her print Cityscape for the front cover and to Susan Moxley for her help in preparing it for publication. And my thanks to John, Olivia, and Gareth for their encouragement and support.

Earlier versions of Chapter 5, When Words Do Not Mean What They Say: Self-Agency and the Coercive Use of Language and Chapter 6, The Fear of Love: The Loss of Agency in Relationship were published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology . An earlier version of Chapter 8, The Analytic Relationship: Integrating Jungian, Attachment Theory, and Developmental Perspectives, was published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy . I am grateful to Wiley-Blackwell for permission to use these articles.

THE SELF IS APPARENTLY A SIMPLE CONCEPT . Each of us has a sense of self, encompassing all the thoughts, beliefs, desires, expectations, and fantasies that reflect our own sense of a unique identity. This was the dominant Enlightenment view of a stable, coherent, knowable self, a self that is conscious, rational, and autonomous (Reis, 2005, p. 86). But this view began to crumble on two fronts. One, of course, was Freuds great revelation that there were more thoughts on an individuals mind than he or she was aware of, that the ego is not master in its own house (p. 86).

But although he has not entered public folklore in the same way, William James (1890/1983), in his Principles of Psychology , also began to disassemble this folk psychology sense of a unified identity. He made a distinction between two aspects of self, the self as subject, or the I, and the self as object, or the Me. James eventually concluded that there is no subject of experiences, no metaphysical I, apart from the physical being who does the thinking. Rather, he concluded that the passing thoughtis itself the thinker (p. 401). The distinction James drew between the I and the Me contributes to the distinction I frequently make in this book between the sense of self (me-ness) and the sense of self-agency (I-ness), but with an important difference, namely that the concept of self-agency can be thought of as a way of reframing the Jamesian I. In this view, the bodys physical experience of agency forms the core and foundation for the emotional and psychological experience of agency (I-ness), an example of Mark Johnsons (1987) view that our bodily experience directly creates symbolic meaning and conceptual thought.