On Becoming a Thou: Discussion of Steven Stern’s “Breathing Together: Needed Relationships and Complex Selfobjects” and Daniel Goldin’s “Empathy on a Continuum”

As a dyed-in-the-wool Self Psychologist and somewhat of a sentimentalist, it is particularly heartwarming for me to discuss the papers of Steven Stern and Daniel Goldin, who expand two of the foundational concepts of Kohut’s theory: the selfobject experience (Stern, 2024) and empathy (Goldin).

Revisiting these concepts prompted thoughts about how Kohut’s clinically, intuitively, and personally driven theory left us with much that was implicit, complex, ambiguous, and illusive. Whilst this was undoubtedly influenced by Kohut’s wish to remain connected to his beloved classical psychoanalytic home, it is also the nature of the beast, as Sandler (1983) points out. Concepts tend to be somewhat elastic to allow room for change, growth, and a range of interpretations while providing a measure of continuity. Meaning is not confined to a single point but is found and developed in a meaning space (Sandler, 1983). Furthermore, the meaning of psychoanalytic concepts should always, as Kohut believed, be influenced by our clinical material.1 Our ongoing attempts to make sense of and theorize about what is happening in the room with our patients require us to continually make more explicit what is implicit in our theoretical concepts. This is what “keeps things going”, as Goldin says. And it is what both Stern and Golding do with their two papers.

But there is more. We cannot deny how our own subjectivities influence the way we understand what is implied in the psychoanalytic concepts themselves and therefore how we understand our clinical material. If we hold our theories lightly, as Orange (1995) and the late Buirski and Haglund (2001) advise, if we embrace our fallibility, otherness, and differences, and if we also acknowledge and consider the impact of our context and histories, then, over time, concepts can, will, and should be stretched to contain even more dimensions of meaning. The dimensions of meaning of each concept will also differ from one psychoanalyst to another, and