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Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine, after attending my first IAPSP conference in 1994, that I would ever have the incredible honor and privilege of being invited to present the Kohut Memorial Lecture—that one day I would be given the opportunity to honor and remember my way-before-his-time hero, Heinz Kohut, for his courage, creativity, and the outstanding and lasting theoretical framework he developed.
I thank the conference organizers for the invitation and their confidence in me. Presenting the lecture at the 46th Annual IAPSP International Conference: “Mind-ing Our Gaps—Cultivating Vulnerability and Presence in the Face of Otherness,” held in Pasadena, California, was an incredible experience.
I also thank Tim for his trust in me and our process, and for courageously permitting me to present and publish this disguised material.
Heartfelt thanks also to my colleagues and friends1 from around the world who, over the years, have encouraged me to write, commented on, and edited versions of my publications and presentations.
Kohut (1985, p. 33) knew about multiple selves, and I begin this lecture with one of my favourite quotes:
If we put our trust in empirical observation, using introspection and empathy as our tools, we will be open to [the fact that] … Instead of a single self of conscious experience … we will encounter a variety of incongruous and inconsistent phenomena. We will see different selves, each of them a lasting psychological configuration, each experienced as absolute and as the center of the personality, not only in different agencies of the mind, but also side by side within the same agency. We see these various selves fighting for ascendancy, one blocking out the other, forming compromises with each other, and acting inconsistently with each other at the same time. In general, we will witness what appears to be an uneasy victory of one self over all the others. But we will also see that some individuals are more capable than others of tolerating