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The body of this book consists of six case histories provided by six different psychoanalysts supervised by Heinz Kohut. Each of the cases had begun before Kohut had formulated his psychology of the self. In the first three cases the therapist was under the impression that the patient's correct diagnosis was a psychoneurosis or neurotic character disorder. This diagnosis was taken to mean that the core problem of the patient was a conflict between the psychic structures of id, ego and superego concerning oedipal or incestuous strivings and that a classical transference to the analyst would develop. Since such a transference did not develop, each of these cases had to be rediagnosed as narcissistic personality disorders as defined by Kohut (1971, 1977). The patients' complaints are consistent with this diagnosis: unable to perform adequately, dissasatisfied with the job, lack of direction and initiative, preoccupied with unhappiness, depression or depression masked by compulsive promiscuity or voyeurism, need for external stimulation to become perked up, lack of enjoyment in sex, and a sense of missing cohesiveness and inner firmness. The transferences took the forms elucidated by Kohut: mirror transferences and idealizing transferences. In mirror transferences the grandiose (omnipotent) self of the infane is remobilized and the analyst is treated as either an extension of the grandiose self, or as someone similar to it (twinship or alter ego transference), or as a person with special relationship to the self (mirror transference in the narrow sense). In idealizing transferences the analyst is attributed all the idealizations which the infant had transferred from himself onto the parent when his narcissism had been shattered.
The discrepancy between the original and final diagnosis is significant for one of the goals of this book. The Psychology of the Self is concerned with demonstrating the superiority of Kohut's new psychology. The analysts who had been trained in