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My new book, Kohut’s Self Psychology for a Fractured World: New Ways of Understanding the Self and Human Community, has three fundamental aims. First, it hopes to offer the most extensive and innovative understanding of Kohut’s concept of self in the literature by providing chapters on the structural, functional, and dynamic accounts of the self along with chapters differentiating the self from the ego and explaining psychopathology from a self-psychological perspective. My second aim is to compare Kohut’s concept of the self with modernity’s notion of the self as autonomous, pragmatic individuality to show not only how modernity is misconceiving the self and its needs but also how this misconception is implicated in many of society’s most grievous problems. My third aim is to imagine what a community would look like if its homes, schools, workplaces, and general practices had as their fundamental goal creating persons who had vibrant, coherent selves at the core of their experience. That is, I attempt to envision an ideal self psychological community.
As Peter Zimmermann has so nicely blurbed on the back of the book, “It is well known that one of the least clearly defined concepts in psychoanalytic self psychology is the concept of the self—until now.” Rather than focusing on the clinical implications of Kohut’s theory, this book examines Kohut’s key conceptual claims about the self with the keen eyes of a philosopher. Along with offering in-depth analyses of the structure, functions, and dynamics of the self, the book offers a number of original interpretations of Kohut’s ideas, including the identification and classification of the fundamental functions of the self and their relation to self-structure, an interpretation of the energy or quantitative side of the self as de-sexualized eros, and a metapsychology in which the self is clearly differentiated from the ego.
While Kohut’s notion of the selfobject as someone or something capable of playing the functions of t