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As a non-Kohutian analyst interested in what I might gain from self-psychology, I eagerly looked foward to reading this book to learn more of a significant nature about self-psychology. I was disappointed in the uneven (in-depth) nature of this work. I believe there are, and will be, many exciting developments in the area of self-psychology that certainly other individual books and edited works will bring to life.
As with most other psychoanalytic approaches and schools, self-psychology has presented us with both theoretical and clinical innovations, and significant ones, in my view. In theory, elucidation of the concepts of mirror, twin, and idealizing transferences are important, as are the key concepts of transmuting internalizations (described previously by a different nomenclature in the writing of Kernberg, Winnicott, Alexander, and others) and empathic failures. Ideas around empathy and the intersubjective field, in my thoughts, have been explored extensively by the interpersonal and objects relation school, although certainly with a differing slant and tone some of the time.
In clinical work, I believe the general approach of the self-psychologist is not new to most Academy members. It has proved new to a significant and receptive number of “classical” analysts who previously were involved with a stiff, inappropriately rigid and “scientific” view of psychoanalytic theory and just what one does with countertransference, introspection, and empathy in the psychoanalytic situation. Most Academy members were and are humane, human, and appropriately flexible in the analytic situation. As for the move from “Oedipus” to the “self,” Ferenczi, Rank, Winnicott, Bowlby, Balint, Sullivan, Horney, and many others have previously expressed the importance, although sometimes not in a stated way, of pre-oedipal dynamics. The concepts of hope, growth, and self-realization similarly do not seem new to me, and in particular, Karen Horney wrote extensively on the concept of self-r