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Because I believe that both self psychology (Kohut, 1959, 1971, 1977, 1979, 1984) and the intersubjective approach (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984a, 1984b; Stolorow et al., 1987; Stolorow & Atwood, 1992) are clinically useful, especially in the understanding and resolution of therapeutic impasses in work with more difficult patients, I have long been troubled by what I regard as their significant epistemological, theoretical, and clinical liabilities. In the spirit of the depressive position, I will try in the following “mixed review” to sustain ambivalence without splitting by indicating something of what I value as well as what I reject in these psychoanalytic perspectives.
(A distinction will be maintained between self psychology, or selfobject theory, and the intersubjective approach, in view of the claims by the authors of the latter that, although it is widely regarded as an offshoot of the former, their perspective has independent roots in phenomenology and personology and that it in fact subsumes and transcends self psychology.)
Kohut's method of argument, like Freud's, may be regarded as dialectical in the sense in which, being derived from the Greek dialektikos (discourse) and dialektike (debate), dialectic simply connotes reasoned argument. Beyond this very general usage, however, the word is commonly associated with the dialectical logic of Hegel (1807; Singer, 1983) in which thought is held to evolve through the clash of