The Process of Constructing the Self and Its Relation to Psychotherapy

Possibly the most important connection is that, having achieved sexual intimacy with the predictable outcome of childbirth, the protective efforts of both parents are needed to maximize the probability of survival of their progeny. Psychotherapists function as substitute attachment figures to clients seeking protection from perceived threat to the self. In this role, they, like parental attachment figures, attempt to soothe and comfort clients and also to enable them to learn more effective self-protective and selfcomforting strategies. (It should be noted that when the danger is physical, other professionals, such as police or physicians, are needed.) The use of a paid professional as a substitute attachment figure carries the potential for both a corrective process that could free clients from the misperception of threat and also a distorting process that could exacerbate the problems of clients. For example, the therapist could provide the secure base from which the client could explore their past experience with danger and anxiety or, alternatively, could add the therapist’s own distortions to the client’s. A particular threat is that, in the intimacy of their attachment relationship, sexual feelings would be aroused. Because this is a natural co-occurrence outside of therapy, it would be expected within psychotherapy as well. Maturation The process of self-organization is regulated by maturation. This means that, as the brain matures, the number of ways in which it can represent the relation of self to non-self increases. Awareness of the array of strategic organizations and their developmental progression can facilitate therapists’ recognition of clients’ strategies, clarify their adaptive historical roots, and promote selection of ameliorative therapeutic techniques. Like Guidano’s post-rationalist constructivist perspective, dynamic-maturational theory posits that most strategies were adaptive in the context in which they developed. Infants can only represent experience as two simple transformations of sensory stimulation. Cognition. One transformation is based on the temporal order of the stimulation. This “cognitive” transformation is represented as sensorimotor procedures of how the self responds to stimulation and the effects of that response.