Advances in Self Psychology: The Evolution of Psychoanalytic Treatment

“I may begin by saying that psycho-analysis is not a child of speculation, but the outcome of experience; and for that reason, like every new product of science, is unfinished. It is open to anyone to convince himself by his own investigations of the correctness of the theses embodied in it, and to help in the further development of the study” (Freud, 1911, p. 207). Freud himself, throughout his life time, continued to study and correct his earlier findings and bequeathed us a science that he knew, like all other sciences, to be unfinished. Not all of Freud's students have always taken the above comments of the master as seriously as they deserved. In retrospect it seems that the flood of psychoanalytic advances slowed to a trickle after Freud's death. To be sure, the work of the ego psychologists and of the object relations theorists continued important lines of investigation that had been started in Freud's time. But one looks in vain for fundamental breakthroughs on the order of, for example, Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory or of his replacement of the topographical with the tripartite model of the psychic apparatus. The more normative phase of scientific development that characterized the forties, fifties and sixties is easily understood as an expression of