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Selfobject—the central, foundational construct in the psychoanalytic psychology of the self—can be defined phenomenologically as an object that a person experiences as incompletely separated from himself and that serves to maintain his sense of self (Kohut, 1971, 1977). We perceive this concept to be vulnerable to two maladies that can afflict important theoretical ideas in the early phases of their evolution. On the one hand, there is a tendency for the concept to remain unduly static and narrow, restricted to the particular idealizing and mirroring ties delineated by its originator. On the other hand, in the enthusiasm of theoretical expansion, there is the danger of the concept becoming overly general and imprecise, as when it is extended to encompass almost any caregiving activity that a child or developmentally arrested adult may require. Our intention in the present paper is to offer an expansion and refinement of the selfobject concept that we believe can skirt both the Scylla of theoretical encrustation and the Charybdis of overgeneralization. It is our contention that selfobject functions pertain fundamentally to the integration of affect, and that the need for selfobjects1 pertains most centrally to the need for phase-appropriate responsiveness to affect states in all stages of the life cycle. To develop this claim we must first examine briefly the pivotal role of affect and affect integration in the structuralization of the self.
We conceive of the self as an organization of experience, referring specifically to the structure of a person's experience of himself (Atwood and Stolorow, 1984, chap. 1). The self, from this vantage point, is a psychological structure through which self-experience acquires cohesion and continuity,