Thanks I will have a look at google :-)

I like it when I look at different varieties of therapy and it seems like they are all saying fairly much the same thing, just with different terminology. Philosophy can be a lot like that too with theories all the way back from Plato, through the middle ages, etc etc all the way up to right now. Sometimes you see a swing too, like with our views on animals through history the intellectuals have swung from them having feelings to them being automata to their having feelings to their being automata etc. Right now we are in the 'they have feelings' line... Will it swing back? Perhaps... The truth lies somewhere in the middle (yes they have feelings but not some of the more cognitively sophisticated ones we have and thus they can't suffer in quite the way we can).

Seeing the similarity in different theories through the ages... I love that because it is like admidst all the controversy and dispute and disagreement... There is a core of something we have discovered. Like with different varieties of therapy converging on some of the aspects of the human personality / theraputic process...

:-)

I wonder if the 'narcissistic personality' that Kohut speaks of just is the ego that engages in idealisation and twinning. I certainly engage in those. Yeah, he does talk about the healthy narcissist too. It really is fairly good. Hard to get to the heart of it when the jargon is unfamiliar to me, however.

Brilliant quote!

:-)

I think I need to get in touch with my inner narcissist / grandiose self... I have an alter that has that function... I don't like being the centre of attention but if I could learn to like it (discover the part of me that does) then I would do better with seminar presentations...

:-)