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Probably every psychotherapist or psychoanalyst has an implicit model of psychopathology and an associated implicit model of childhood psychological and emotional development. The psychoanalytic therapist always sees the adult's current pathology as rooted in distortions in infantile development; the therapist's way of viewing his/her patient's communications will be influenced by their implicit model of early development, as will their view of the nature of the therapeutic process. It is always valuable therefore when a therapist or analyst is able to make explicit and to elaborate their model of psychopathology, of therapy and of early development; this helps the rest of us clarify some of our own assumptions. One such recent figure is Heinz Kohut, who in his development of ‘self psychology’ created what Stolorow (1983) and others have argued is a new ‘paradigm’ (Kuhn 1961) for psychoanalysis; Stolorow sees this as a conceptual shift from ‘the motivational primacy of instinctual drives to the motivational primacy of self experience’. Previously I have attempted to evaluate Kohut's contribution with particular reference to the theory and therapy of narcissistic disturbance against the background of British psychoanalytic theorising (Mollon 1987). The aim of the present paper is to draw out the implications of self psychology for understanding infancy, and to show how the infant reconstructed by a self psychologist differs from that reconstructed by other theorists.
Kohut seems to have been particularly aware that any point of view is relative to the observer's position (Kohut 1982) and this may have helped him to clarify different observational vantage points. Thus he distinguished between psychoanalytic observation proper - which in his view is derived from the empathic-introspective stance in the consulting room, used as a means of understanding complex experiential states - and other kinds of more external observation, such as observation of infants; the two are