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In an attempt to investigate a specific segment of character pathology and the therapeutic and theoretical flaws in distinguishing needs and wishes, Shabad sets up straw men to make his argument. He uses self psychology and drive theory as foils as he offers his version of a psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The term “self psychology” as such does not appear in the paper, but its code words do, for example, a reference to Mitchell's (1988) metaphors of “damage,” “narcissistic ‘needs,’” therapists who are perceived “to have little or no autonomous existence as distinct from that of being a fantasied selfobject responding, as if on a yo-yo attached directly to the patient's needs,” “the therapist … designated to play the role of selfobject in the patient's private narcissistic drama,” and the use of “one's lovemaking partner as an erotic selfobject vehicle to give pleasure to oneself.”
In Shabad's version of self psychology, a “one-sidedness is most obvious when the therapist is designated to play the role of selfobject in the patient's private narcissistic drama.” He illustrates his view of this one-sidedness when therapists “take on the patient's projection of responsibility and meet the patient's entitled passivity with their own indebted activity.” Shabad is clever at spelling out the blind spots and countertransference dangers he assumes to be operative in the treatment approaches of his foils but does not address the countertransferential effect of his suggestions.
The distinction between “needs” and “wishes” is central to Shabad's