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A special section of papers on the current status and the future evolutionary development of self psychology highlights The Evolution of Self Psychology, the seventh volume in the Progress in Self Psychology series. Most of the 18 clinical and theoretical papers are written by prominent analysts who have previously contributed to the self psychology movement.
Michael Basch, Paul Ornstein, Morton Shane, and Howard Bacal discuss the relationships between object relations theory and self psychology, Basch and Ornstein take opposing views on whether or not it is valid and useful to conceptualize object experiences other than selfobject experiences.
Are there situations in which children as well as adults are in a state where selfobject experiences are not needed to maintain the structure of the self? Basch answers in the affirmative and argues that object experiences occur when a person is functioning as a center of independent initiative or a cohesive self.
By selfobject experience, Basch refers to situations in which an endangered self is strengthened by the intervention of another. He uses the term object experience to refer to a situation in which a cohesive self is expressing itself affectively. Basch distinguishes himself from those self psychologists, such as Wolf and Ornstein, who would define a selfobject as anything that relates to the self. In Ornstein's view of selfobject experience there is no place for object experience because selfobject experience includes everything.
In normal development, Shane explains, the appreciation of the other as not part of the self-experience is a function of the slow, incremental process of decentering, a process that is clearly discernible in child observation. Shane's view that the very concept of selfobject has undergone a major metamorphosis and that it no