Epilogue

Abstract

In concluding this book with a set of papers which focus upon the delineation of meaning and intentionality in the verbal dialogue, we come full circle upon our beginnings. We have seen how “Life in the dialogue” entails the continuing struggle with the processes of engagement-disengagement, fusion and differentiation, self and object—in short, the effort to establish a unique sort of “intimate separation” between one and the other; a separation which enables the difficult task of communicating. We have traveled the path from the automatic, built in self- and object-regulating strategies of the newborn and preverbal infant, to the highly complex, never fully conscious, communicative structures of the adult striving to improve and master his relations to himself and others. It is this view of the communicative process as a struggle for mastery which characterizes the psychoanalytic contribution to a theory of communication.