Integrating One-Person and Two-Person Psychologies: Autochthony and Alterity in Counterpoint

Abstract

The classical psychoanalytic concept of the one-person treatment model and its assumptions concerning psychic reality are compared with the contemporary two-person model, subsumed under the concept of "alterity" (otherness). The classical model of unconscious mental life is explored in terms of the principles of "autochthony" (signifying the fantasy that self and object are created entirely from and by the self) and "cosmogony" (an aspect of primary and secondary processes that accounts for the creation of a personal and an objective world-view). Autochthony and cosmogony are subsumed under the category of "creationism." I discuss why I identify these three phenomena by these relatively unused terms.