As a clinician who wishes that someone would do for self psychology today what Charles Brenner (1955) did for the Freudian canon almost 40 years ago, I had high hopes for this book. Psychotherapy After Kohut: A Textbook of Self Psychology has a far grander ambition than its title suggests, and in pursuit of a larger goal falls short of its explicit one.

The authors tells us, in an interesting and “experience-near” introduction, about why they were not satisfied with the readings available to them for a graduate course in self psychology. Their observations are thought provoking and compelling. They considered the original sources too advanced for students only minimally grounded in the fundamentals of psychoanalytic theory, and Kohut in particular difficult to read and understand. Second, they felt that much of the literature was too polemical for beginners, that it tended to obscure points of contention rather than illuminate