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Contemporary self psychology is lucky to have issued from a founder whose legacy included innovation. Kohut was not jealous or controlling of his theory and urged his followers to build on his ideas. Thus, over recent years self psychology has changed, expanding into relationally based theories and joining a convergence of analytic ideas flowing from different contemporary thinkers and schools. Tributaries carrying Kohutian ideas about empathy and selfobject experience, relational ideas about mutual influence and analytic subjectivity, and intersubjective ideas about the analytic field and dynamic systems are merging into new conceptual organizations. Intersubjective Self Psychology: A Primer, a collection of essays edited by George Hagman, Harry Paul, and Peter B. Zimmermann, is a fine example of such a merger. The authors of the book are senior analysts from TRISP, a New York psychoanalytic institute, and practicing clinicans.
Well-written with an absence of analytic jargon, ISP is designed to answer the need for an understandable, but not simplistic, introduction to self psychology and intersubjective systems. It accomplishes this goal in the form of one unique synthesis of the two theories. As the authors state, the book is intended to be a clinical guide, “practical, useful, and filled with clinical concepts and ideas which the reader will readily be able to apply to his/her therapy practice”(p. xiii). It provides the authors’ model with many clinical applications that should serve as a resource for lay readers, for patients curious about relational psychoanalysis, for psychoanalytic therapists, and for teachers of psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
After a comprehensive introduction to intersubjective self psychology, the book is divided into two sections. In Section One the initial chapters present an overview of the model, illuminate the self psychological foundations of empathy and selfobject functioning, and describe the intersubjective systems’ emphasis on the r