A Kohutian Perspective on the Foreclosure of the Freudian Transference in Modern British Technique

There are many aspects of Kohut's contributions that can be viewed as immensely valuable. His emphasis upon the role of empathy and the selfobject function in childhood development and in the analytic process has more than proved its importance, as attachment studies have revealed the crucial significance of the “dyadic regulation of affect” and many forms of personality disturbance have been shown to be disorders of affect regulation (Mollon, 2001b). Neurobiology has amply validated Kohut's perspective on the relational nurturance of the brain, as well as the mind—showing that the main attachment figure does indeed function as a regulatory part of the child's self-system (Schore, 1994; Mollon, 2001a). Kohut's notion of transmuting internalisation, whereby externally provided psychological functions are gradually internalised to form the structure of the self, his articulation of the line of development of narcissism, with its bifurcation into the poles of mirroring and idealising, its role in the formation of the self-structure of persisting goals and ideals—and his outline of the vertical split in the psyche of narcissistically disordered patients—all these have been outstanding and original contributions with the ability to transform the clinician's practice in myriad benign ways. There is no doubt in my own mind that working in accord with Kohut's empathic perspective, the active use of the imagination to understand the world from the patient's point of view, leads to better results than working otherwise.

Kohut's concepts of the self and the selfobject can strike some as obscure. However, there are many places in which he describes these with delightful clarity and simplicity. For example, in his Chicago Institute Lecture of May 9, 1975, he remarked:

What we recognise in the narcissistic personality disorders is that there exists within us a central configuration in the personality, something we experientially recognise as our self, something that