Recognizing Recognition in Self Psychology

Recognition and mutual recognition, as psychoanalytic concepts and as dimensions of experience familiarly associated with relational theory, historically have not captured much explicit attention in self psychology. That is not to say Kohut and his colleagues exactly overlooked these ideas: Can you imagine a recognition process in the absence of empathy, the active process of thinking and feeling one's way into the emotional world of another? Perhaps it is a matter of distinguishing Kohut's (and, by extension, his self-psychological colleagues') listening position from Kohut's responding position (see Fosshage 1995, 1997, on listening perspectives). During his lifetime, and right up until his death, Kohut had complained that, no matter how hard he tried, he was always misunderstood concerning what he meant by empathy; for him, he explained repeatedly, empathy was to be understood as the method of data gathering that defined the field; data derived from any source other than from the patient's subjective perspective was not acceptable as a legitimate source of information. So, by definition, the analyst inevitably listened to the patient from an empathic perspective. But how the analyst responded to the patient was a conceptually different matter. The analyst might respond to the patient, maintaining the same empathic point of view, still, that is,