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Lawrence Friedman concludes his commentary by stating, “No reservation will diminish Kohut's gigantic clinical contribution. Regardless of theory, the problem of treatment is to hook up with the patient's trying, and to make it profitable in one way or another. Laurels go to the man who gives us new ways to visualize what a patient is trying for. And that Kohut has surely done.”
Kohut's, How Does Analysis Cure? (1984), published posthumously, edited by Arnold Goldberg with the collaboration of Paul E. Stepansky and assistance of Elizabeth Kohut, represents Kohut's final extended thoughts on the analytic process. The book contains the clearest statement of a lifetime effort to explore how analysis works. Regardless of whether the reader accepts the premises of self psychology and of self and selfobject and its reformulations of empathy transmutation and internalization, the issues these concepts bring into focus are invaluable to all psychoanalytic clinicians and theoreticians. Our commentators differ as to the weight to be given to the Kohutian perspective, reflecting the diversity of views present in the analytic community.
Kohut devotes the first section of How Does Analysis Cure? to clarifications and responses to criticisms of his last book, Restoration of the Self. He presents his most current view of psychic development and pathogenesis. Emphasizing the experience-near perspective, Kohut places fragmentation anxiety of the self as the fundamental anxiety of human existence. Fragmentation anxiety is the result of failure of selfobjects to provide the self with solidity, harmony, and the impetus for maturation. Maturation leads to the capacity to utilize mature selfobjects throughout life. Kohut distinguishes between an oedipal phase, which is universal, and the oedipal complex, which is a pathological development that results