Recent Sociohistorical Trends and the Ascent of Kohutian “Self-Psychology”

This presentation is intended to suggest a correlation between recent sociohistorical trends in American life which tend to weaken the individual's sense of self, thereby stimulating compensatory self-preoccupation, and the currently great appeal of Kohutian “self-psychology” to mental health practitioners. The notion to be elaborated here is that our society exacerbates individual trends toward pathological narcissism; in response, many within our field have turned to the work of Kohut, not only to clarify their patients’ predicaments, but to illuminate their own psychic plight, increasingly experienced as involving threats to the viability of their selves.

While several central Kohutian concepts and formulations are considered in the present inquiry, this is not for the purpose of critiquing Kohut's contributions per se, an endeavor to which a wealth of recent psychoanalytic literature is devoted. Nor is my concern here with psychoanalytic politics or psychoanalytic group psychology such as has contributed to Kohut's being regarded by one group of dynamic psychotherapists as hero and by another group as heretic. Suffice it to say with regard to the latter issue that the wide appeal of Kohut's work derives in part from its challenge to a psychoanalytic establishment felt by many to be unresponsive and inaccessible, thus replicating their more or less conscious experience of contemporary society at large. In turn, pathogenically disturbing societal circumstances universally provoke echoes of unsatisfactory aspects of relations to one's parents of childhood. Though having illuminated the manner in which the original lack of empathy from parents and, later, that from