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H. Kohut, How Does Psychoanalysis Cure? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
KOHUT'S VIEWS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS set forth in this, his final, volume hold no surprises for those readers who have followed the statements of his evolving ideas in his two previous major efforts, The Analysis of the Self (1971) and The Restoration of the Self (1977). Most important of all is the centrality he continues to confer on the outer social and interpersonal side of the self, what he terms the "selfobject, " as both real and internalized, and the practical deemphasis on the inner psychic and individual side, the "selfsubject" in his term, as both imagined and externalized. Difficult though this may be to comprehend about his newly announced, self-described innovation in contemporary psychoanalysis, it is, nonetheless, still true that the psychic self as a dynamic point of origin, or source of its own uniqueness, still fails to receive the attention it deserves in his work. Or for that matter in general psychoanalytic inquiry. So his version of self-psychology proves, in the end, to be insupportably one-sided: it provides for no more than a truncated psychology of the self, lacking as it does a point of dialectical tension for psychic movement toward both connectedness and separateness from within. Curiously enough, not unlike Hartmann's ego psychology and Sullivan's interpersonal relations of the late 1930s,