During the last decade within the field of psychoanalysis, there has emerged a set of innovations which, in the future, may come to be as influential as the work of the ego psychologists. Heinz Kohut presented his psychology of the self not as a consolidation of earlier trends within psychoanalysis but as a body of knowledge that explains in a manner which has important social implications a group of phenomena that were approached differently in the past.

On the basis primarily of his exploration of narcissistic personality disorders in the United States, Kohut concluded that classical psychoanalytic theory and technique had certain limitations which could be remedied with the aid of a “complementary” perspective.1 He argues that the older “drive defence”