The Search for Confirmation: Technical Aspects of Mirroring

This essay on various aspects of mirroring is written with the hope that it might correct some common misconceptions. My focus is on the technical considerations of mirroring in the clinical psychoanalytic situation. In the almost two decades since Kohut (1968) first described the mirror transference as the patient's insistent demands on the analyst for the latter's confirming presence, this term has become familiar to many psychoanalysts. However, along with many other psychoanalytic terms, mirroring, mirror transference, and selfobject are defined more by common, agreed-upon usage than by reference to a generally accepted theoretical framework. I would define selfobjects as a special class of objects—or of symbols or ideas representing objects—that perform the specific functions of providing a self-evoking and self-sustaining experience to the potential and to the emerged self. Strictly speaking, therefore, selfobjects are neither self nor object; they are the subjective aspect of a function performed by a relationship. As such, the selfobject relationship refers to an intrapsychic experience and does not describe the interpersonal relationship between the self and other objects. It denotes the experience of imagos that are needed for the sustenance of the self.

Kohut's (1971) clinical vignette of Miss F. serves as an excellent illustration of the mirror transference. Miss F. became violently angry