TAKING/INCLUDING PLEASURE IN THE

EXPERIENCED SELF
Roy Schafer, PhD
New York, New York
First, there is a prefatory section on the narrative construction of the experi-
enced self ; then, an account of both taking and including pleasure in the
experienced self and the impediments to doing so; following which, an explo-
ration of how these impediments are grounded in the internal world, where the
conditions of pleasure can be disrupted by problematic relations with bad
objects and conicting identications and standards. Attention is paid through-
out these explorations to technical issues, particularly those centered on the
interplay of transference and countertransference.
Keywords: pleasure, narration, pride, identication, transference-countertrans-
ference
In what follows, the experienced self will be conceptualized as a narrative: a tale a
person tells both explicitly and, by metaphor and gesture, tacitly; a construction that
circumscribes certain versions of that persons characteristics, possessions, relation-
ships, and surroundings (Schafer, 1992). The personal characteristics emphasized vary
from person to person; they might take in family and other social afliations; bodily
features and processes; talents, skills, and accomplishments; autobiographical sum-
maries; present personality characteristics; and aspirations for the future. The ac-
counts that constitute the experienced self can be revised; they often are, though some
tend to stick fast. Throughout, it is presupposed that these features can be described,
discussed, reected on, and revised only when presented in one or another version or
narrative construction.
A person taking pleasure in exercising and reecting on his or her functional
repertoire usually feelsfor that moment at leastproud, excited, and self-respectful.
However, to a degree and with a frequency that varies from one person to the next,
even anticipating these pleasures or certain ones of them, or functioning in a way that
might give rise to them, can occasion painful anxiety, shame, and guilt. These
consequences can then be denied, disowned, projected, turned into their opposites, or
defensively revised, as when the self is made out to be undeserving of pleasure and,
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Roy Schafer, PhD, 241 Central
Park West #1A, New York, NY 10024. E-mail: royschafer@mindspring.com
Psychoanalytic Psychology Copyright 2006 by the American Psychological Association
2006, Vol. 23, No. 4, 609618 0736-9735/06/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0736-9735.23.4.609
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in extreme cases, to feel secure only when experiencing deprivation and punishment
and engaged in self-derogation.
The clinical analyst necessarily takes account of the wide range of conscious and
preconscious signs of these experiences and their transformations. Interpretations become
more effective as, increasingly, they center on the unconscious anhedonic and antihedonic
standards and demands that emanate from disturbing and incompatible identications and
internal objects.
Here, the history of superego studies becomes relevant. Psychoanalysts have
discussed at length problems associated with severe, inconsistent, absent, and lax
superego standards. They have done the same with respect to grandiose ego ideals. For
example, they have emphasized aws in structural development that result in chronic,
tormenting guilt and shame, and a sense of helplessness and hopelessness regarding
the possibility of ever meeting standards that one has set out of reach or has dened
so vaguely or uidly that it remains unclear what would qualify as approaching or
reaching them.
Notwithstanding these advances in understanding, I believe that this problematic realm
of standards, with all its intrapsychic and interpersonal ramications, includes other
important issues which have not yet received as much attention as they deserve, or at least
aspects that have not been analyzed in terms that could throw more light on them.
Pleasure in the Experienced Self
As used here, pleasure in the experienced self is being used to subsume a number of
terms that are either applicable on different conceptual levels or overlap one another on
the same level. These terms include functional pleasure, pride in accomplishment,
heightened self-esteem, fortifying self-love, and mild hypomanic feeling deriving
from fantasies that one is on the verge of approximating the highest standards included in
the ideal self or ego ideal (Freud, 1921/1957c, 1923/1961; Sandler, Holder, & Meers,
1963; Schafer, 1962, 1967).
These accounts of experience usually have bodily components, most of all a sense of
the self and its contents as physically expanding or already expanded. They are expressed
in such declarations as I feel swell, I feel grand, and Over the top. Seeming to get
physically bigger and fuller, these subjects feel they are taking up more of their life space.
Numerous pejorative expressionsamong others, swell-headed, puffed up, big
shot, inated ego, too big for your britches, and lling the roomimply this sense
of an enlarged body. Some of this expansiveness may reect the increased ow of blood
and perhaps increased blood pressure and heightened muscle tone that are common signs
of excitement.
Also, it is not unusual that the excitement in feeling enlarged involves altered sensory
thresholds (keyed up), postural changes (standing tall standing out), some possibly
diffuse sexual arousal (turned on), and a restlessness that gets to be expressed in activity
for activitys sake (cant sit still, rarin to go).
Noteworthy in this context are certain sources of pleasure Freud singled out in Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921): children project their grandiose narcis-
sistic tendencies into their parents, thereby endowing them with powers and establishing
them as ideal gures, and later they do so with leaders, political party, and team loyalty.
In relation to these gures or symbols, they then feel and act not only awed, thrilled,
obedient, and secure in afliation or submission, but also swelled with reected glory. It
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is from these full-bodied and full-spirited others that they gain and enhance their
self-respect. Much of this secondary reected glory will be played out in the idealizing
aspects of their transferences.
Impediments
Analysands frequently complain of difculty in freely experiencing pleasure in the
effective exercise of functional aspects of the experienced self: difculty in experiencing
functional pleasure within the bodily self and in letting the usual bodily signs be seen by
others or denying others the chance to evoke them or infer their presence; and chronic
attacks on self-respect to the point where they do not deserve pleasures of the self.
As mentioned, the transference-countertransference interplay often features these
impediments to pleasurable self-experience. For example, analysands often portray the
self as a site of hard, unwelcome, and ungratifying workthe self on a rock pile, one
might say. In doing so, they seem to be aiming at a number of results. Supercially, and
contrary to the recommendation that they report thoughts and feelings unselectively, that
is, that they free associate, they explain that they are laboring to comply with the
expectation that they should dwell only on their problems. Defensively, however, they
may be avoiding anticipated confrontations with the major gures that serve as templates
for their transferences, for instance prohibitive, shame-inducing, or envious parents. In
doing so, they may be implementing persisting masochistic tendencies to perpetuate
suffering or sadistic tendencies to try to reduce their analysts, represented as demanding
parental gures, to despair and helplessness. Alternatively, they might be warding off
what they imagine to be their analysts intention to terminate the treatment, an intention
presumed to be based on lack of interest in good feelings or impatient overestimation of
improvement. Finally, these analysands might be enviously and provocatively refusing to
express gratitude to their analysts; they anticipate that their doing so will force them then
to face what is for them their still problematic feelings of dependence and fear of what lies
ahead should they ever give up their old ways.
Add to these many possibilities one that seems to stem from the analysand plays on
the analysands tendencies in the same direction: an implied and maybe even a stated
insistence on steadily addressing serious problems.
In response to all of which the analyst might become impatient and demanding, though
possibly masking this development with repeated instructions, reassurances, even exam-
ples of doing it right. Then the analysand is in control of an actual or potential
persecutory gure, though perhaps masking that control with a dutiful show of compli-
ance. At this point, enactments or actualizations of past problematic relationships threaten
to usurp the analysis.
Other impediments to feeling and expressing pleasure in the functional self and its
accomplishments include certain signicant personal and interpersonal meanings and
feelings associated with a sense of going too far in lling and swelling the bodily self.
Other analysands might believe they are far from lling that self. It is not possible to
conceive of someones genuinely feeling pleasurably expansive while not feeling inhab-
ited by, and in good contact with, one or more good internal objects, that is, an
unconscious sense of the presence of signicant others, a sense that they have become part
of who you are, of yourself, and your place in the world. A most agreeable feeling of
self-love and self-respect and increased good will toward others in both the internal and
external worlds intertwines with enjoying the love and respect of others.
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A world bereft of any sense of good internal objects, however recessive, cannot
support good, nondefensive self-feelings. It is unrealistic to believe that someone can
continuously maintain a blissful, utterly egoistic, internal object-free state without relying
heavily on defensive denial and idealization.
Of course, the benign self-feeling uctuates. This ux indicates that, inevitably,
subjects retain mixed, uid, fragmented, and bad as well as good fantasies of the self and
its objects. For the moment, however, I am concerned with those analysands who cannot
develop or sustain pleasure in the experienced self. For example, there are those who
automatically or quickly regard any increased magnanimity as not really a sign of loving
feeling; instead, they believe it merely exposes self-centeredness, competitiveness, and
unduly inated self-esteem. Feeling unworthy of self-esteem, they consider their good will
impure or corrupt. They fear that it is not so much the reciprocity and mutuality of
mature relationship that really matter as it is an insistently unidirectional, grandly
egocentric ow of feeling from the self toward others.
Often, these subjects reservations are at least partly justied, for their experienced self
might well have taken on a manic function. If so, they may be expected to experience
those others who do not automatically manifest high-spirited interest in their expansive
feelings as more or less objectionable, and they are likely to quickly dismiss them as wet
rags, pills, out of it, or party-poopers. In unresponsive company, they become
irritable or glum. The demandingness that is part of this manic shift betrays both the needy
and the defensive constituents of this elated mood. Requiring total control, they cannot let
others be themselvesin effect, to be separate beings. Then, they are truly self-centered
and opposed to reciprocal relatedness.
Considering these excessively expanded positions in their most general aspects, they
amount to a sacrice of any sense of inwardness. Then, being less then full, overowing,
and merged with their swallowed-up objectsthere is a predominantly oral orientation
hereimplies the disturbing expectation that they have opened themselves to neediness
and potentially humbling or humiliating self-reection. In their persecutory fantasies, they
have become distinct gures who must be rejected as undesirable, unworthy, destructive
human beings.
Other difculties arise when hitherto inhibited, self-defeating analysands gain greater
functional efciency, achieve more, and begin to experience and express pride in what
they have done and now can do. Then, the analyst can anticipate that they might soon
feelor expect their envious analysts to feelthat they are boasting or showing
off. Also, they will back away from their positive feelings, minimize their accomplish-
ments, suddenly fall silent, or fail to report the qualms that accompany their upbeat
reports. They will feel that they have no right to be taking up so much interpersonal space;
to do so is too narcissistic, too selsh, too pushy. Upon analysis, it soon becomes
clear that they have tried to escape feeling anxious by regressing to a pattern of complying
with their old taboos against feeling grand or swell. They have not earned their now
discredited self-respect. For them, being beat up is safer than being upbeat.
Although much of their difculty seems to stem from oedipal prohibitions and
fantasies of phallic swelling, it would be wrong to ignore the importance of the primarily
oral-narcissistic issues I have been emphasizing (about which, more below).
Also among the analysands who hesitate to feel expansively and pleasurably full are
those who expect that the feeling cannot last, that luck will turn against them, that defeat
lurks around the next corner. In some of these instances, the gloomy predictions are based
on a sense that they will soon feel compelled to turn against themselves and undo
whatever has stimulated their feeling swell. They seem to sense that the factors that held
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them back originally, though now diminished in force, may reassert themselvesthat is,
their masochism, their guilt over the competitive and destructive aspects of success, and
their attachment to bad objects. And usually they are right not to count on internal sources
of support.
Vicissitudes of Filling the Experienced Self
Certain turns of speech concerning feeling pleasure in the self have, as mentioned earlier,
signicant implications for these analysands everyday experiences of self as place (e.g.,
full of yourself and pumped up). Those analysands who are especially troubled by
feeling good about themselves seem to imagine that when they are in some hypothetical
neutral, everyday, unselfconscious state of being, they do not quite ll up the physical,
psychical, or social boundaries that dene their selfs limits. Instead, they have shrunk
back from direct contact with their boundaries and thus from contact with those around
them as well. They have been careful not to ll their selves fully. They require pumping
up.
In the more pronounced instances of this experienced stance, which may be well
concealed behind overt condence, they seem to anticipate that any such contact with their
boundaries, thus with the surround, will lead to one of at least two contrasting and difcult
sets of feelings and attitudes: on the one hand, being considered by self or others or both
to be too bold, presumptuous, intrusive, invasive, seductive, perhaps even challenging or
confrontational and, on the other hand, considered to be clingy and obnoxiously, shame-
fully, or dangerously in need of or demanding support and affection. Thus, these shrink-
ing subjects seem to be retreating from their self-boundaries in shame and hiding within
their frames. To them, in their uncertain and potentially persecutory or harmful worlds, it
seems the safest course to lay low, hoping to escape notice. Inwardly and perhaps even
in actual appearance, they become smaller than one might be under hypothetically secure
conditions and also smaller than others in the world; stooped, head hanging down,
abdomen slumped, groin pushed back, or otherwise humbled and diminished in signi-
cance, out of place, lower down, in no way a threat, reduced to a devalued body part or
substance (a nobody, a pipsqueak, dirt, an asshole, and so on)altogether, safer
in anonymity and resigned to degradation. Stevie Smith referred ironically in one of her
poems to a lady who was so rened she had neither bosom nor behind.
Further analysis may arrive at the interpretation that much of the persecutory threat to
be avoided is felt to stem from the envy of others. The threat might be recognized as
emanating from those who are strangers to feeling swelled and so begrudge anyone around
them her or his feeling self-satisfaction; alternatively, the threat may stem from those who
can only feel self-satised at the expense of others. In this respect, the threatened subject
may be complicit in that his or her sense of pride may have swelled into feeling haughty
if not contemptuous and then behaving as if omnipotent; all of which provokes the envy
of those sensitive to, and provoked by, this state of being in others.
Here, sex comes to the fore. The analyst can expect that, unconsciously, menand
some womenmight well fantasize the swelled self as an aroused phallus, and its joyful
and controlling excitement as leading toward sexual omnipotence, that is, fantasies of
fully realized sexual prowess and triumph on the model our society endorses for males
along with a sense of successful oedipal challenge and transgression. In this context, fears
will arise of suffering retaliation through exclusion, humiliation, injury, and enforced
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passivity or powerlessness, each of them unconsciously equated with castration. Shrink-
ing denies and symbolically avoids the phallic intrusiveness.
With many women, the well-lled self is experienced as too sexually forward,
seductive, immodest, pushing it in their faces, etc.; and being rooted in experiencing the
physical female body in social space, it might still carry additional signs of phallic
aspirations. On the other hand, the fullness is unconsciously equated with pregnancy and
gestation, as it may be in men, too, for instance, artists.
Descriptively, one might say that on the whole the commonly encountered inhibition
of feeling swell involves living psychically and perhaps even physically in a cringing and
impotent position, as though the analysand must be careful not to get out of line and offend
forbidding and punitive higher powers. Supercially, this stance might look like modesty
or humility, but analysis is likely to bring to light its being a matter of self-protective,
self-derogation, or self-castration by making sure not to get too close to the boundary lines
of the self-as-place, that is, of being careful enough so that no room is left for any
judgment, fair or unfair, that hubristically one has gone too far sexually or otherwise.
In another aspect of their subjective experience, these shrinking subjects do not feel it
to be safe to think they have any control over the space around them. This is the space that,
in an undened way, is often implicitly regarded as an extension of the self and treated as
such. Upon encountering an imposing or overwhelming gure, one who does, so to
say, ll the room with threatening, dominating, or alluring presence, the threatened subject
is more likely to quickly sense these very effects on her or him. In this context, the
analysand might be continuously creating such gures by projection in order to contin-
uously present the self as being in a disarmed and self-disrespectful condition.
Maintaining self-boundaries is, as we know, always a matter of personal concern.
Bodily metaphors associated with the pleasurable self often imply concern with preserving
the intactness of self-boundaries. Analysands who feel full or swelled can anticipate that
getting close to these boundaries might destabilize them and eliminate whatever level of
integration they have achieved. We seem to encounter this fear at those not unusual times
when analysands get so mad that they feel about to explode or when they feel so
successful directly or vicariously that they feel close to bursting with pride, overow-
ing with joy, losing your head, running wild or simply, This is too much! In these
instances, it is likely that prominent parts are being played by pregenital, especially
urethral and anal fantasies of loss of control (for example, pissing in my pants or
shitting a brick), fantasies that might be linked to fantasies of madness or dying.
Before going on, I should say that an overview of the discussion thus far seems to
warrant introducing the following cautionary note: analytic discussions of self-experience
should specify which perspective on the self is in play: is it the experienced self as agent
or the self as containing boundary. In previous publications I have covered relevant
metaphoric and narrative variations in self-denition (1968, 1976, 1978, 1992).
In the Internal World
Although the person typically narrates many of the subjective experiences just described
as self-initiated or, by projection, as provoked by others, analysis frequently succeeds in
identifying negatively inspired internal gures working against effectiveness, warranted
pride, and self-satisfaction. These are the so-called bad objects: envious, competitive,
shaming, painfully indifferent, and narcissistically brittle. Very often, then, it is not so
much some unconscious fantasy of a divided self as it is one of being up against a cast of
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destructive characters. These opponents of taking or including pleasure in the experienced
self inhabit the place that, ideally, is occupied by the voices, facial expressions or other
gestures, and sometimes as whole gure of good objects who are more or less realistically
based on signicant gures from the past, parents most of all. When these bad objects
appear in consciousness, they gure not as hallucinations but as images, recollections, or
imagined presences recognized as such. They say or enact the challenge, Who do you
think you are? They predict failure and humiliation. They warn of overwhelming dangers
of rejection by them and others, and so on. They constitute what might be called the
jeering section.
Many of the postures, fears, restraints, and projections surveyed above are grounded
in identications with parental gures. These are the gures that were experienced most
intensely during the analysands formative years. Most inuential are those that served as
models or enforcers of moral standards and standards of excellence. Analysts assume that
these childhood relationships were so strongly colored by the childs conicts, misunder-
standings, dependent needs, and projections of unacceptable hostility and grandiose
narcissistic strivings (Freud, 1915/1957a, 1921/1957c, 1923/1961) that it would be a
mistake to infer that the analysands currently incompatible standards correspond closely
to a knowable, unied, and extensively veriable historyas it has been said in histori-
ography debates, to infer that they correspond closely to what really happened.
In cases of fully accomplished identication, the analysand acts under the subjective
heading I. The identication gure appears to have been moved beyond the status of
internal object (introject) and been fully assimilated into the experienced self. However,
as already mentioned, when the subject has projected the standards into others or, in some
instances, when the standards have actually emanated from others who might still be
playing that part in the present surround, she or he might appear as once again an internal
gure or part-gure, such as a baleful eye or commanding voice, thus as a whole or partial
he, she, they, or you. Or when other, unintegrated identications lead one simultaneously
to strive toward incompatible goals, this I can become a self experienced as split into parts
(I cant pull myself together, Get your ass in gear, etc.) In that case, intrapsychic
conict will be experienced either as suchthe divided self, man against himself, the
dispersed or secret self, and so onor as an array of battling forces.
Some of those analysands troubled by feeling good about themselves seem to be
certain that they are obliged to serve only the interests of others. For them, any trace of
self-interest and self-satisfaction, real or imagined, is an occasion to feel fragmented as
well as guilty of being unloving. Hidden within these generalized others there may be a
depressed or dysfunctional parent with respect to whom one feels obliged to remain
loyally inferior and unhappy and busy being reparative. As to inquiring into what it is that
is loved about these unwholesome others, the analyst can expect considerable ambiguity
and other forms of defensiveness that enact the obligatory protectiveness; they equate
being close observers of their bad objects with prohibited hostile surveillance. Reality
testing has become destructive.
More than that, these analysands have identied at least partially with those problem-
atic parental gures, thereby integrating into the self-experience the role of an inherently
unt or damaged person. In all three respectsservice to others, love of these others, and
identication with themthese subjects must go on showing devotion to their impaired
objects while not rupturing the conned, unstable self by becoming different that is,
becoming able in body and mind, self-respecting, openly perceptive, and enjoying their
own good feelings. They feel that it is doubly dangerous to become whole and separate
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gures who are assertively adaptive, sexually and otherwise, and capable of maintaining
a variety of interests.
In other cases, the analysands seem to be identied with envious, inhibiting, shame-
ridden parental gure or to be obeying bad internal objects of that sort by living an abject
and limited life, or both. And they shift between identication and submission to these
internal objects.
In short, there are numerous ways in which including pleasure in the self can be
experienced as a way of being bad and looking for, or causing, trouble. A sense of
transgression and guilt may lurk in the wings of enjoying ones own satisfying perfor-
mances. It seems not worth it to allow into ones life any feelings of joy and of being
well-regarded by others. Narcissistic aims being taboo and genuine joy inevitably having
a narcissistic component, joy is unconsciously equated with deance, betrayal, wounding,
even killing in some fantasies.
Abandoning the Pleased Self
A special impediment to enjoying a fullness of self can be attributed to subjectively
abandoning the pleased self. By means of identication, the analysand is able to repeat the
experience of abruptly losing the attention, empathy, or acceptance of an important
parental gurethe mother usually; in this repetition, the analysand is playing both parts:
parent and excited but disappointed young child. For example, analysands often switch
abruptly from spontaneous expressions of interest, enthusiasm, or pride to indifference,
doubts, pessimism, and self-criticism.
To the observing analyst, the analysand seems to be acting in accord with an
unconscious fantasy that there is a guardian at the gates of consciousness; this is a guard
who says, Go no further! Indeed, go back! This is subversive! This is inadequate!
This is not what is wanted! So what?! or Dont bother me. The analysand is then
being simultaneously, enthusiastic and squelching, or interested and bored, assertive and
oppressive, concerned and indifferent, and so on.
By backing away from the full version of the self-boundary, the analysand creates that
space between the experienced self and the boundary of the self-as-place that was
mentioned earlier: a shrinking back from the boundary of the self, losing heart and also
playing it safe by cringing or hiding. Then, the analysand can feel that while the self has
stayed put, there is a personied othera bad internal object, an internal critic or saboteur,
who has turned his or her back on the self or has been suddenly transformed into an
unempathic observer of the self: a painful turn of events, yet one that might keep the self
safe by holding it back from transgressing, doing damage, and inviting retaliation.
Frequently, the analysand has already converted the analyst into that abandoning gure by
projecting into him or her the rejecting bad internal object.
Most often, it requires the analysts intervention before the analysand can give voice
to this preconscious or unconscious fantasy of abandonment. Only then can it be con-
dently traced to its probable origin in childhood experience.
Incompatible Standards
Before concluding, there is more to be said about how setting and trying to meet
incompatible standards limits the experience of pleasure in the self. It may be matter of
incompatible moral standards, in the realm of both ethical and primitively cruel and
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exacting standards (Hartmann, 1960). Or it might be a matter of conict among standards
of excellence whether situated within the more or less conscious, reality-attuned ideal self
or diffuse, more or less unconsciously maintained grandiose ideals. Incompatibility may
exist (in topographic terms) intersystemically; such is the case, for example, when
exemplary achievement clashes with unconscious moral prohibitions against achievement
in those instances of achievement implying too strongly forbidden oedipal victory.
Standards of excellence may clash among themselves, for example, when quality of
output is pitted against speed or quantity.
Also, unconscious standards, which usually stem from partial identications with
projectively magnied parental gures, are especially likely to be incompatible and also
not consistent with many standards maintained consciously and along socially normative
lines.
Some analysands do, of course, take stands against their problematic standards of
excellence by adopting pessimistic, devaluing postures; for example, Why try?
Nothing matters in this stinking world or I know I cant be tops, so why try at all?
In this regard, analysis brings to the fore what may be called layering of positive and
negative ideals associated with incompatible identications, though continuing object
relations may be in play, as when an adolescent rebels against parental demands for
exemplary performance.
Additional disharmony and limitation of pleasure enters the scene when, for example,
the guilt felt by some analysands seems to be too powerful for them to bear for long, so
that they try to avoid states of anguish by projecting their moral imperatives into gures
in the external world; in this way, they make the issue seem to be one of either submission
to or humiliation by others, or some other form of harassment or persecution. When this
transformation trails a long history behind it, one that matches a subcultural hypermor-
alistic or otherwise judgmental cultural tradition, it serves so many functions that it the
analysand must persistently ght off the analysts approach to it. Gaining interpretive
access to these incompatible standards, their origins, and especially their persistence can
then be quite difcult.
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Correction to Stolorow (2006)
In the article Heideggers Investigative Method in Being and Time (Psychoanalytic
Psychology, 2006, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 549602), the sentence on p. 599 should read as
follows: Heidegger makes crystal clear that by Being-in he does not mean a categorial
relationship in which one present-at-hand entity is spatially contained inside another
present-at-hand entity.
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