ABSTRACT
it is difficult to date the onset of development; it is impossible to specify the beginning of meaning. The self develops as a self-seeking entity. Process and being are in a sense the same. This interactive contingency means that the caregivers must have available selves with whom the emerging self of the child interacts in vitalizing and development maintaining ways. In both development and in analysis, such a meeting, an I-Thou encounter, can occur; something can happen. In both settings, tragically or seemingly inevitably, the obverse can and does occur. Developmentally this often results in deformation or at least in restitutive alteration of the self. In treatment such a nonmeeting often leads to clarification of previous derailment but may also feature a loss of hope or the repetition of the very sort of mimetic occlusion that is conceptualized to reside at the core of the “pathology.” Interpretation itself, then, may constitute an enactment, a painful repetition; understanding may seem ironic rather than growth enabling.
