Introduction: Self Psychology After Kohut—One Theory or Too Many?

No one who read the seminal article by Shane and Shane (1993), “Self Psychology After Kohut: One Theory or Many?”—which beautifully delineated the essences of Kohutian thought while simultaneously elaborating the contrasting perspectives in self psychology—could ever claim that psychoanalytic self psychology wasn't going anywhere. The same can be said of anyone who reflected on the evocative piece by Goldberg (1998), “Self Psychology Since Kohut”—the one that succinctly examined what he felt then were the three essential trends in self psychology (i.e., the traditional, the intersubjective, and the relational).

When you develop a paradigm that actually turns out to have some meat on its bones (i.e., one that isn't wrong or unimportant), people, perhaps reflecting the narcissism Kohut wrote about decades ago, will be glad to tell you that they knew it all along.1 But what people have known all along for more than 45 years now continues to expand in ways that, well, we just couldn't have known all along. This is attributable in part to the relatively recent mushrooming and cross-pollination of essentially disparate disciplines ranging from a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives, philosophy, literary theory, infant research, and attachment theory to neurobiology, cognitive science, complexity theory, and physics, to name a few. It is also due to the high degree of complexity—read unpredictability, self-organization,