Epilogue

In nature's infinite book of secrecy, A little I can read.

Ashort 20 years ago Heinz Kohut burst upon the psychoanalytic world with his essay “Forms and Transformations of Narcissism,” heralding a new psychology of the self. To be sure, the discerning observer can in retrospect detect the seeds for the new ideas in his 1959 article “Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis,” which was aptly subtitled “An Examination of the Relationship Between Mode of Observation and Theory.” Indeed, as Goldberg reminds us, this latter article contained enough controversial ideas about empathy and psychoanalytic science to have almost been rejected by the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and it was the vigorous intervention of Maxwell Gitelson that prevailed over the timid souls who were clinging to obsolete aspects of an honorable tradition. Thus was forecast the fate of Kohutian self psychology: to repeat within the smaller circle of the psychoanalytic community the history that Freudian psychoanalysis had experienced — and is experiencing — within the wider circle of medical psychology. To paraphrase Goldberg, the history of psychoanalysis is replete with attempts to solve scientific controversy by administrative fiat. Though occasionally successful in exiling pioneering thinkers — Adler, Rank, and Horney come to mind most prominently, but there were others — suppression of many of their most creative ideas have never been equally successful but have regularly been absorbed into the mainstream, albeit without appropriate attribution to their originators. What Freud said about psychoanalysis has also proved true about post-Freudian ideas and especially about self psychology: “Men are strong so long