The Self in Psychoanalysis and in Phenomenological Philosophy

My contribution to the study of the last—and alas posthumous—work of Heinz Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure? (1984), does not have the ambition of arbitrating the quarrel among psychoanalytic schools concerning the respective places of such concepts as “consciousness,” “ego,” and “self.” Instead, by accepting as a quite plausible working hypothesis the metapsychology of self psychology and the analytic technique corresponding to it, I would like to reflect upon their import for philosophical reflection concerned with the relationships between subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Hence I will assume the same attitude that I held when I was writing Freud and Philosophy (1970), namely, to let myself be instructed by analytic experience in order to learn what it can teach us about what philosophical reflection cannot draw from its own grounds.

In the first part of this essay I present a summary of the themes that will figure in the confrontation with philosophy that will take place in the second part.

1. It is first of all important to obtain an exact measurement of the gap between Kohut's metapsychology and what he calls “traditional analysis,” namely, that of Freud, as prolonged by ego analysis.

   Paul Ricoeur, Ph.D., is John Nuveen Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago.

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   The principal point of dispute has to do with the place of the Oedipus conflict in the genesis of those troubles capable of being treated by psychoanalysis, especially as this takes place through transference. Kohut's thesis is that the conflict centered around sexual drives, seduction, and aggression, from which emerges the formation of love objects, is not as basic as is the conflict that affects the primitive relations between the self and its selfobjects. By the self, Kohut does not mean a psychical apparatus constituted by various instances bound together by mechanisms, but rather an indivisible psychical life, only accessible by empathy—that is, a sor