Book Notices

ADVANCES IN SELF PSYCHOLOGY. Edited by Arnold Goldberg. New York: International Universities Press, 1980, 562 pp., $32.50.

Most of the contributions collected in this book were presented at a conference on self psychology in Chicago in 1978. The aim is to study advances and to seek coordination with other psychoanalytic theories and allied fields. Thus, the major chapters address self psychology in relation to development, the concept of health, clinical applications, and the sciences of man. At the end, Heinz Kohut reflects on these papers.

In the introduction we find precise statements about the basic issues by Arnold Goldberg, the editor. He reviews the history of Kohut's work and the difficulties in arriving at a definition of the self. As a guide, he poses the statement by Kohut and Ernest Wolf: "the patterns of ambitions, skills, and goals, the tension between them, the program of action they create, and the activities that strive toward the realization of this program are all experienced as continuous in space and time … they are the self, an independent center of initiative, and an independent recipient of impression" (p. 4). Indeed, we see here what Goldberg describes as "the scope of the journey that self psychology has taken in its conceptual expansion," a scope that assigns to the self a central psychological phase, with other psychic functions therefore to be seen as secondary. Later on, Goldberg seems to reduce the meaning when he states that "the self becomes the idea one has of one's relationships with others, with those who continue to sustain and support and satisfy" (p. 5; my italics). He substitutes the usual concept of "representation" with "idea" and refers only to the positive aspects of relationships.

This reviewer sees his task as focusing on the advances to be forwarded by self psychology rather than on a review or critique of its basic propositions. Goldberg faces quite openly the possibility that the new ideas may lead to a pola