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In A Fresh Look at Psychoanalysis Goldberg has brought self psychology and its claims to a new state of development. The seeds for much more thoroughly elaborated hypotheses are to be found in Kohut. For example, Kohut (1977) toyed with the idea that modern physics (quantum mechanics) has moved from 'a sharp separation between the observer and the observed … to a stance that considers the observer and the observed as a unit which is, in principle, in certain respects not divisible'. Goldberg has worked out in detail the epistemological implications of this idea and has advanced arguments on its behalf. Similarly, Kohut 'playfully' considered the possibility that self psychology is more fundamental than psychoanalysis—the latter being a limited case of the former just as Newtonian mechanics is a limited case of relativity physics: psychoanalytic interpretations in terms of incest wishes, castration anxiety, and superego guilt may be true, but only as a consequence of prior, more fundamental developmental events which find their correct understanding in self psychology. Goldberg has greatly enlarged this notion by hypothesizing that self psychology describes the structure of psychic development, and as such provides the basic rules according to which both object relations and intrapsychic processes exercise their influence upon development. This idea constitutes a certain completion of self psychology as a theory for providing the strongest possible grounds for the generality of its claims (see also Goldberg, 1989).
Goldberg's work is of obvious interest to adherents of self psychology but should be of no less interest to its critics, since he presents the best and most comprehensive statement of self psychology and its claims that is yet available. His argument is at once philosophical, theoretical, and clinical. Critics of self psychology will, henceforth, be obliged to find sound counter-arguments. In this respect Goldberg's book is a significant contribut