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In this masterful work, Jill Gardner organizes her writings from the last 30 years. This period coincides with Self Psychology’s growth from Kohut’s revolutionary “shift from the centrality of instinctual … drives to the motivational primacy of self experience” (p. 10) to a thoroughly intersubjectively derived understanding of the inception, development, and transformation of the patient’s subjective world. The theoretical summaries in Chapters 2 and 8 illustrate this evolution. The introductions to each chapter, written for this book, help bring them into a coherent whole with their steadfast phenomenological focus on empathically understanding our patients’ inner experiences in context. According to Gardner, Self Psychology has always maintained that developing this understanding with our patients is essential to helping them.
In her Acknowledgments, in the beginning of her book, Gardner states that she aims to “give back” to the people in her life who provided her with variants of developmental selfobject experiences, starting with her parents, her mentor Miriam Elson, some of Kohut’s close collaborators, and many colleagues, friends, patients, and supervisees. She does so very generously and ends her book with her account of those transformative moments on her way to becoming a competent self psychologist. Using an experience-near language throughout her writing, Gardner draws us into the heart and mind of this competency and her deeply penetrative understanding of theory. Most of the people I know who read her book said something akin to Donna Orange’s endorsement on its back cover: “I love this book.”
Although aimed as a resource for supervisors and teachers of Self Psychology, Gardner’s book is not a primer (see Buirski & Haglund, 2001; Hagman, Paul & Zimmermann, 2019; Jackson, 1994; Lee & Martin, 1991; Lessem, 2005; Natterson and Friedman, 1995). It’s much more than that. Its organization reflects the transformations of self-psychological theory over the last