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I recently had the pleasure of reading John Hanwell Riker’s latest book, “Kohut’s Self Psychology for a Fractured World: New Ways of Understanding the Self and Human Community.” It is a unique alchemical wedding of philosophy and psychoanalysis, that is at once profound, accessible and intriguing. Psychoanalysis has since its Freudian inception considered itself applied philosophy and nobody is better suited than Riker, a professor of Philosophy with a deep knowledge of Kohut’s thinking, to unite and expound upon both. Riker connects psychoanalysis, specifically Self Psychology, to philosophers from Plato and Aristotle, to Nietzsche, Kant, Heidegger, Whitehead, from the ancient Greeks, to existentialists, transcendentalists, postmodernists and beyond. His book not only deeply examines Kohut’s thinking, but places it in the context of what ails modern human beings. It offers a rich philosophical ground on which to analyze and critique the materialism and nihilism that plague us.
In Chapter 1, Riker walks us through Kohut’s process in which our inborn narcissism is transformed into our nascent selves. Our ideals, correlated to our own unique, singular being, develop into our ambitions and establish our nuclear self. To actualize our ideals becomes our life’s work. In a healthy psyche, and society, these lead to self-actualization and, ultimately, to what Kohut calls “cosmic narcissism,” a connecting with a transcendent set of values while maintaining a profound caring for our world. Our narcissistic grandiosity, or need to be recognized and cherished, is tied to our human need to relate to perfection. When we are able to fulfill our healthy narcissistic needs, we achieve narcissistic equilibrium, psychic homeostasis, and a sense of what Kohut calls continuity through space and time. When we come close to achieving our ideals, we recover a feeling of that original, narcissistic bliss.
Riker critiques the postmodern mindset that all structure is inherently de-constructibl