ABSTRACT
Near the end of the first year of a psychoanalytic individual therapy, a male patient, ill for most of his adult life with depression, anxiety, and bodily pains, explains that he really does not mind the forthcoming holiday break. While each self in interaction makes up and changes aspects of the ethos by moment to moment participation, the ethos in turn acts as context for who each participant self can be at any moment through processes of self-regulation or longer term adaptation. Within a therapy setting, the self of the therapist, like all others present, both helps to make the ethos within the ethos-selves system and is simultaneously affected in the possibilities of who he or she can be by the ethos. Postmodern ideas of a relational, narrative, or dialogical self that is empty—other than that which is made through relationship—are usually positioned in opposition to the autonomous self which, the argument goes, is identified with modernism.
