Heinz Kohut

1 Kohut's most original contribution is the conception of the Self, which in various ways was already circulating in post-Freudian psychoanalytic culture. Unlike the precise status of the notion of Ego as conceived by Freud, the notion of Self seems significantly less defined and lacking in rigorous determining features; it is a concept which has been steadily extended in the lexicon and theoretical models of psychoanalysis, beginning with the use made of it by Winnicott and Hartmann during the Forties and Fifties. This central but also undefined status of the Self is clearly expressed by Kohut when he asserts that «Demands for an exact definition of the nature of the self disregard the fact that ‘the self’ is not a concept of an abstract science, but a generalization derived from empirical data […] We can describe the various cohesive forms in which the self appears, can demonstrate the several constituents that make up the self […] and explain their genesis and functions […]. We can do all that, but we still not know the essence of the self».152

Kohut does not radically question Freud's theory of the psychic apparatus. The psychology of the Self, unlike the rest of the Freudian theoretical corpus, is not a theory on a high level of abstraction, but configured as an observational model. While in Freud the Id, Ego, and Superego are psychic agencies (Provinzen, Istanzen, Bezirch), Kohut's Self is a mental content which belongs to a different level of abstraction, not metapsychological but personological.

Kohut's attempt to describe the Self as a content and structure of the mental apparatus but not as an agency (Kohut, 1971) can become problematic since it seems unclear how the Self can be content and a structure at the same time. Insofar as he refers to the Self as «a structure within the mind […] cathected with instinctual energy» (Axiom 1), it is evident that he apparently accepts the Freudian metapsychological

model and its fundamental conc