Kohut's and Heidegger's Selves: Dwelling Near the Source

In a recent article, Stolorow and Atwood (2012), in no uncertain terms, urge self psychology to drop the noun “self” from its vocabulary. “In our view, the biggest theoretical shortcoming in psychoanalytic self psychology is its language of the ‘self’” (Stolorow and Atwood, 2012, p. 573). The reason for their claim is that “the self” reifies the experience of self-hood and transforms it into an entity with thing-like properties. The self becomes an entity that we can have or not have. In accordance with the authors “post-Cartesian” philosophical position, they warn us that the use of the term self undoes Kohut's most fundamental understanding of the context-embeddedness of our subjectivity.

Although I am in total agreement with Stolorow's and Atwood's non-objectifying contextualizing view of psychoanalysis, I will nevertheless contest their thesis concerning the use of the term “self.” Not only do I find their worries of the disastrous effects of using the word unfounded but also contra-productive to their own aims. I think replacing the “self” with the “sense of self ” actually increases rather than decreases the (ever-present) risk for reified conceptualizations. My main objections to Stolorow's and Atwood's “anti-self” thesis will be presented in the following five points.

Point 1:In view of their emphasis on contextual thinking, Stolorow and Atwood paradoxically seem to imply that, irrespective of context, the use of the noun “self” always invites non-contextual thinking. At least they never bring up the question of the importance of context for understanding Kohut's meaning of the word self. It is well known that Kohut (1977) used the term “self” differ