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At a recent psychoanalytic congress between British Independents and US self-psychologists, I asked a number of those who had known Kohut what he had been like as a teacher. Typical replies were: ‘a genius’, ‘outstanding’, ‘brilliant’ - and this from some who disagreed with aspects of his work. Yet few in Britain seem to have much understanding of what a wonderful thing is self-psychology, how it illuminates many common clinical problems and therapeutic impasses and leads the therapist into an easier and gentler way of working.
These two books provide an excellent overview of contemporary self-psychology, which seems to have evolved into two schools since Kohut's death in 1982 - the ‘classical’ school based in Chicago where many of the practitioners trained directly with Kohut, and the post-Kohutian theorists of intersubjectivity based in Los Angeles, where Stolorow is a leading figure. Of the two books, Mahler and Kohut stays closer to the work of these two theorists and includes some very competent comparisons of their respective views of psychological development and the implications of these for psychoanalytic treatment. The eight chapters were originally papers presented at the Twenty-fifth Margaret Mahler Symposium on Child Development in 1993. A particularly valuable chapter is Ernest Wolf's on ‘Selfobject Experiences: Development, Psychopathology, Treatment’. Contrasting with Kohut's description of just three