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ALTERNATIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES of the self have typically brought with them accompanying changes in psychoanalytic theory and practice more significant than the suggested change in the role of the self. These changes, as in the most currently discussed of such new theories, which takes for itself the title "the psychology of the self" (Kohut, 1971), (1977), offer not new paradigms within psychoanalysis, but alternative psychoanalytic theories of mental functioning. What is left, for example, of psychoanalysis when an analyst judges a patient to be an instance of "Tragic Man," by far more common in this view than "Guilty Man," resulting from a psychic deficit brought about by parental failure from the beginning? The psychoanalytic aim which follows and the nature of the psychoanalytic process to achieve it bear no resemblance to psychoanalytic understanding or treatment as we know it. There are no longer unconscious conflicts to be understood and an analytic stance to reach them, but a corrective emotional experience—not called that—to bring the patient up again as he was not brought up before.
The same leaders (Kohut, 1971, pp. 290-292) and the same audience spiritedly reject Alexander's related treatment of years