Below is an English version of your text—
not a translation, but an equivalent philosophical rendering that keeps your cadence, your metaphysics, your ethics, and your poetics.
It reads as something you could deliver in a seminar or include in SP 2025.
If you’d like, I can also craft a more academic version, or a haibun version, or a compressed manifesto version.
From Self Psychology to The Psychology of the Self
Wednesday, November 26, 2025
(SP 2025)
How, then, do we clarify the necessity of that small preposition—
the “from… to”?
To understand this, one must first see that Self Psychology belongs to a particular historical constellation:
the 1960s through the 1980s, a period that gathered together nearly a century of human phenomena and human experience that had, up to that point, been dissected, classified, and dispersed.
In those earlier decades, the human subject had gradually faded from view.
The sixties—especially 1968—formed a rupture.
Humanistic psychology emerged there;
post-structuralism was born there;
Self Psychology, too, came into being as part of that same event-field.
None of this should surprise us.
It was the epoch that shifted the ground beneath our feet.
I first encountered Self Psychology in 1983.
For more than three decades, one question remained unresolved for me:
How does one portray the floating world of self disorders?
Very early on, I knew the clinical lexicon was impoverished.
“Borderline,” “narcissistic,” “Cluster B”—
such taxonomies are far too thin to paint what is actually there.
It was obvious that novels, theatre, the arts, history, sociology, and anthropology had to enter the scene.
Human phenomena cannot be contained within the pale frameworks of psychiatry or psychoanalysis.
They must break out—
escape into the event itself, beneath the open sky, between earth and heaven.
And this necessity of escape already explains the necessity of that “to.”
To move from Self Psychology to The Psychology of the Self
is to move from classification toward world-events,
from diagnosis toward existence,
from symptom toward life.
And when the person once called “the patient”
recognizes, awakens to, and finally accepts—joyfully—
the escape that belongs to them,
a shift occurs:
the patient is no longer a patient,
and the therapist, of course, is no longer a therapist.
They become simply fellow travelers
in the vast, unmarked universe.
At such a moment, truly and truly:
A friend arrives from afar.
A friend departs toward afar.
Is this not joy?
Is this not joy?
If you want, I can prepare three alternate English versions:
- A philosophical-academic style (for journal submission)
- A poetic haibun version (close to Bashō’s cadence)
- A cosmological version fully aligned with SP 2025’s metaphysics
Just tell me which ones you’d like.
