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Originally intended as a Festschrift in honor of Heinz Kohut's seventieth birthday, this volume of twenty-three essays was published as a memorial, following his death in 1981. Memorial volumes are not rare, but had Kohut lived to see this book published, he would have seen one of only a handful of Festschrifts in the psychoanalytic literature. This in itself may be a commentary on his charismatic impact on psychoanalysis.
Arnold Goldberg's thoughtful editing and wise choice of contributors is evident throughout the book. After stating that self psychology has "made psychoanalysis exciting once again," he asserts that "no brief is made for self psychology as the future of psychoanalysis. Rather, self psychology demonstrates the future of psychoanalysis" (p. xiv). Perhaps he means that the excitement generated by self psychology demonstrates that there is a future for psychoanalysis. Even so, to label a book entirely devoted to self psychology concepts and their applications as The Future of Psychoanalysis does seem to imply precisely what Goldberg disclaims—and from the tenor of the contents, most of the contributors would endorse such a claim.
In Part I, "Clinical Critique of Self Psychology," Arnold Cooper observes that self psychology is unique in the history of psychoanalytic ideas, in that its clear alternatives to standard theory "have been debated within the analytic movement rather than relegated to a non-analytic purgatory" (p. 3). He trenchantly delineates six areas of dispute between standard psychoanalysis and self psychology