ABSTRACT
As a summary of the theoretical and conceptual issues discussed above, I would like to discuss the clinical issue of responsibility, which is a meeting point for some, if not all, of the above issues. By ‘responsibility’ (or ownership) I refer to the acknowledgement of various wishes, desires, thoughts, feelings, behaviours and so on, as one’s own (Loewald 1979) and the recognition of how one brings about certain of the situations and conditions in which one finds oneself (Gill 1977). (This, of course, does not imply legal responsibility, which is a different issue.) Freud (1925i) discussed the question of the ‘moral responsibility’ of the dreamer for his dream (although here I will not enter into the ‘moral’ aspects of responsibility, which may be viewed as a specific and restricted area of responsibility in general). For Freud this was intimately connected with his view of the therapeutic process, whereby those aspects of the personality experienced as ‘not belonging’—‘the it’ (the id)—are accepted as part of the patient’s ‘I’ (ego)—‘where id was there ego shall be’ (Freud 1933a).
