On Being the Edgy Alter-Ego: Parricide, Vitalizing Enactment, and the Analytic Attitude

The author presents two cases to illustrate his view that acting as the “edgy alter-ego” can help accommodative patients find rebellious self-assertion so that they can individuate from the negating authorities of their childhoods. He argues that this is a two-step, double-punch process: first, the therapist joins with patients, helping them to access, accept, and use their rebellious self-assertion through modeling, affirming, and twinning; then, he survives patients’ destruction of him in the service of their self-assertion. The author links Loewald’s ideas about parricide and Winnicott’s conceptualization of object use to help explain this clinical process.