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Using the self psychology of Heinz Kohut, Rosenberg seeks to explore family relationships and the emotional and intellectual lives of two American thinkers. Considering
James to have focused more on the freedom and autonomy of the individual, Rosenberg examines Royce's emphasis upon crucial social bonds in family and community. Exploring such Kohutian processes as mirroring leading to healthy narcissism, empathic failures and successes, and various selfobject functions, Rosenberg distinguishes forms of healthy and unhealthy dependencies in the relationships of Royce and James to their parents. James is portrayed as so intensely enmeshed in his family that he needed to extricate himself by establishing autonomy; whereas Royce missed strong relationships and focused on human connectedness in his loneliness. Thus Royce came to appreciate the dependence of human selfhood upon intersubjective relationships, and James came to celebrate individualism. Rosenberg concludes that James's romantic glorification of the individual is less relevant for today than Royce's emphasis on the need for empathy and community.