Self Psychology and “Classical” Psychoanalytic Psychology: The Nature of Their Relationship

For almost a decade now the psychoanalytic world has been explicitly and self-consciously confronted with the evolving articulation of the contributions to its theory and its technique offered by Heinz Kohut and his many colleagues. At first these ideas were presented under the rubric of concern with the problems of narcissism and of the narcissistic disorders as the emergent prototypical personality formation of our time. More recently, Kohut and his followers have adopted the declaredly more encompassing rubric of the psychology of the self. The major landmarks in this progressive unfolding have been Kohut's two books: The Analysis of the Self (1971), and The Restoration of the Self (1977). The first was subsequently declared to be the expression of the psychology of the self in the narrower sense. In it the self is portrayed as contents of the agencies of the mental apparatus, that is, as mental representations within the id, ego, and superego. Kohut's second book elaborates the psychology of the self in the broader sense; the self is depicted as a supraordinate constellation, with the drives and defenses (the central ingredients of classical psychoanalytic conceptions