ABSTRACT
The third chapter, which attempts to develop the implications of the radical critique, argues that the person—an irreducible agent of his own experience—is the proper subject of psychoanalytic inquiry (Schafer, 1976; Gill, 1983; Stolorow, Brandchaft, & Atwood, 1987). The person thinks, feels and acts out of the whole of his inner composition. It does not make sense, then, to parse the doings of his repressed infantile self from those of his adult self. Nor does it make sense to parse the workings of infantile functions from later ones. The early and later acquired functions merge into the present movement.
