It has been fifteen years since Kohut's clinical discoveries irrupted into psychoanalytic thinking and aroused enthusiastic and favourable responses as well as massive rejection.

The theoretical crystallization of the psychology of the self into a new psychoanalytic metapsychology has brought about an acute polarization in the psychoanalytic movement which might still lead to a serious rupture or, conversely, might bring about—as a counterreaction to the revolutionary innovation—the abandonment of a whole sphere of the human psyche which has the means of enriching psychoanalysis both as a psychological theory and as a unique clinical method of treatment.