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First, I want to applaud and second Dr. Robbins' contention that, “If a discipline aspires to be scientifically respectable, new ideas must be tested against old ones as well as against data, and those ideas which survive selectively amalgamated into an evergrowing body of knowledge” (1992, p. x). Although psychoanalysis may not be an exact science, our theory building should nonetheless be consistent with the general principles of theory construction. When there is a failure to account for all the data, there is a need to amend our theory rather than to self-servingly discard the offending data as “meaningless.”
As one who is identified as an object relations theorist, I have always thought of the object relations approach as a psychology of the self inasmuch as the concept of self is central and intrinsic to it. Dr. Robbins makes a strong case for the ancestral link between Fairbairn and Kohut.
In my own thinking, which finds most useful the developmental stages and processes articulated by Mahler, I find Kohut's focus on a particular segment of the overall continuum from birth and attachment to individuation and object constancy extremely useful. This focus lends itself nicely to an integration with the rest of psychoanalysis, but such an integration demands of its proponents a renunciation of specialness.
The central notion of failure of empathy on the part of the self object does not account for the very different outcomes of very different environmental failures. A relatively nonmalevolent failure of empathy (some people just don't get it) will have an outcome that is very different from the situation of a hostile and assaultive caretaking environment, yet both can be labeled as failures of empathy. Robbins' attention to structure as a particular organizational outcome allows for a more open-ended discovery process than does a doctrinaire notion about what structure is or is not. Piaget's findings with respect to the evolution of mental schemata remind