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In considering the editors' questions against the backdrop of the position papers collected in this issue, I have found it useful to divide the various current contributors to the self psychology literature into two broad groups. I call them the loyalists and the expansionists. The loyalists tend to be members of Kohut's original inner circle of former analysands and students who experienced close personal relationships with him. Most of the expansionists, by contrast, know Kohut's work from more of a distance, perhaps primarily from his writings. Correspondingly, whereas most of the loyalists reside in Chicago or nearby Cincinnati, expansionists are drawn from all over North America—from New York City, New Jersey, Boston, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Vancouver.
Whereas expansionists, who also tend to be integrationists, wish to bring into self psychology ideas from sources other than Kohut, loyalists, in the words of Lachmann and Beebe (this issue), adhere to “the assumption that Kohut's writings constitute the authoritative statement.” For loyalists, Kohut's word is the first and the last, and they thus tend to be openly dismissive of the contributions of the expansionists. The Ornsteins (this issue), for example, write that post-Kohut self psychology has achieved “a few relatively minor corrections … but cannot claim significant advances in new conceptualizations.” The Ornsteins regard attempts to delineate selfobject transferences other than Kohut's original trilogy as only “marginally justified.” Paul Ornstein (1994, personal communication) has even gone so far as to declare that people are interested in the theory of intersubjectivity mostly because they “do not know and do not read and do not fully understand Kohut's writings.” Kohutian loyalists seem unaware or