ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for the foundational role of the notion of “value” in psychoanalytic theory and praxis. While analytic theorists have often written as if value were motivationally primary, when they take a step back from the phenomenology, they end up explaining value as deriving from other subjective processes, such as drives, needs, and affects. It is only relatively recently, in the context of the advent of relational thinking in psychoanalysis, that we have been given the conceptual resources to allow for the possibility of value as an essential source of motivation. Utilizing the work of Stephen Mitchell as a starting point, the author outlines a fundamentally valuational theory of motivation, wherein a single subject ascribes different (frequently contradictory) sorts of value to multiple configurations of Self and Other simultaneously at varying degrees of awareness. Several advantages to such a conception are reviewed, from the perspective of ethics, phenomenology, neurobiology, and clinical practice. The author utilizes this model to explore one patient’s early experience and developmental process.
