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[W]e [moderns] naturally come to think that we have selves the way we have heads or arms, and inner depths the way we have hearts or livers, as a matter of hard, interpretation-free fact. (Taylor, 1989, p. 112)
There is nothing like an “I and thou” at all—there is neither the I nor the thou as isolated, substantial realities. (Gadamer, 1966, p. 7)
Theoretical language encodes philosophical presuppositions. In our view, the biggest theoretical shortcoming in psychoanalytic self psychology is its language of “the self.” Heinz Kohut's prodigious contributions to clinical psychoanalysis pertained to a dimension of emotional phenomenology—the experiencing (note the verb) of a sense
of selfhood. The language of self psychology with its noun, “the self,” reifies the experiencing of selfhood and transforms it into an entity with thing-like properties. “A self” is an entity that we can have or not have. It has two poles, joined by a tension arc. It can be cohesive or fragmented. It can be enfeebled, but, in psychoanalysis, it can be rehabilitated. Sometimes it even has the characteristics of a human agent, as when it seeks self-objects (more entities) or, when fragmented, it somehow performs actions to restore its cohesion.
What is wrong with this reifying theoretical language, and why does it matter clinically? In his early groundbreaking paper on empathy and psychoanalytic theory, perhaps our favorite of all his works, Kohut (1959) defined the domain of psychoanalytic investigation as, although he did not use these words, “emotional phenomenology”—that which is accessible to empathy and introspection. As happened with the “psychoanalytic phenomenology” that we first outlined skeletally in 1976 (Stolorow and Atwood, 1979; see also Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange, 2002), Kohut's early phenomenological emphasis led him to a form of contextualism. To us, Kohut's (1971, 1977) lasting and most important contribution to psychoanalytic clinical theory was his recognition that the exp