Afterword: A View from the Outside

The struggle among these authors to define the essential features of Kohut's contributions and the future direction for self psychology is of interest not only to proponents of self psychology, but also to anyone interested in the history of ideas, psychoanalytic and otherwise.

All these authors note the richness of Kohut's innovations in both method (sustained empathic immersion in the patient's subjective reality) and theory (particularly the selfobject concept). Yet, Stolorow argues, there seem to be two groups of theorists in self psychology today: the loyalists and the expansionists. These terms are heavily value laden and, naturally enough, reflect Stolorow's own particular vantage point. Another way to characterize these groupings would be to contrast their strategies of theorizing and the way they position Kohut's contribution vis-à-vis other psychoanalytic schools.

One strategy (including Basch's and the Ornsteins') establishes Kohut's work as constituting a complete, enduring, revolutionary paradigm, leaving only small details or implications to be worked out.

A second strategy positions Kohut's ouvre as a transitional development on the way to the fuller emergence of a more encompassing, more comprehensively revolutionary paradigm. Thus, Stolorow regards intersubjectivity theory and relational theories of various sorts as providing a more complete field or systems model, emphasizing the fully contextual interaction of subjectivities with reciprocal, mutual influence. Stolorow positions Kohut as caught between paradigms and regards as anachronistic some of Kohut's basic concepts, like the reification of a self with a nuclear program or inherent design.

In a different, but closely related, fashion, Bacal also regards Kohut's self psychology as incomplete and transitional. Bacal positions self psychology as half a (relational) revolution, with object relations theories