The Centrality of Selfobject Experience in Psychological Relatedness: Response to Editors' Follow-Up Questions

In my responses to your initial questions, I addressed much of what these further questions comprise. I believe you are right when you say that “for many contemporary clinicians and theorists, … drive theory metapsychology as a whole is no longer particularly useful or interesting.” Self psychology has not redefined human relationships through the concept of the selfobject; it avers that selfobject experience has always been at the core of the psychological aspects of human relationships. Are all significant relationships to be construed as serving selfobject needs? I can only answer from the perspective of my own clinical experience. While employing the methodology that characterizes the self-psychological approach (as I have described it), I have not seen any patients whose psychological relationships with significant others do not centrally entail selfobject experience or the need for selfobject responsiveness. But as I indicated earlier, self psychologists have paid insufficient attention to the experience of providing selfobject functioning. To the extent that one experiences oneself as providing it, this may also evoke and vitalize the sense of self of both analyst and analysand. In this sense as well, the selfobject concept is truly relational: the experience of providing selfobject responsiveness as well as the experience of its provision. Lachmann and Beebe and Stolorow imply this in their answers as well. In other words, selfobject need not only entails the need to receive from the other; it also very much includes the need to give, as Suttie (1935) indicated, to share, and to enter into reciprocal relatedness. All these experiences evoke, affirm, or enhance the sense of self.

I differ from the view of some self psychologists, such as Basch (1991), who would retain the designation “selfobject” to refer to