Kohut and Lacan: Mirror Opposites

Heinz Kohut and Jacques Lacan shared roles as psychoanalytic theorists who built vital epistemological challenges to the psychoanalytic mainstream into their metapsychological and developmental theories. Their radical emendations were born from their respective dissatisfaction with the theory and practice of American ego psychology. Perhaps most fundamentally, each found that, as practiced at the time, ego psychology foisted the analyst's views of reality on the patient, producing results antithetical to the aim of psychoanalysis. Kohut (1984) wrote: “We believe that the [theories] of drive primacy and drive taming … and [the movement] from narcissism to object love are—or have gradually become—part of a supraordinated moral system in scientific disguise; we therefore believe, verbal disclaimers to the contrary, that the actual practice of analysis is burdened by an admixture of hidden moral and educational goals” (p. 208). Lacan (1954b), critiquing a case vignette given by Ernst Kris, held that Kris's “analysis of the resistances … consists [of] attacking the subject's world (that is, his patterns) in order to reshape it on the model of the analyst's world, in the name of the analysis of defense” (p. 332).

Kohut and Lacan thus came to listen and respond to their patients in new ways, even as each maintained that their aim was to stay within and offer correctives to the psychoanalytic mainstream. Their analytic listening produced several points of overlap. For example, each highlighted the vital “clinical importance of recognition” (Muller, 1989, p. 363); each held that aggression was a secondary or reactive phenomena (Lacan, 1948, Kohut, 1972); and each employed the metaphor of mirroring as a central metapsychological and developmental concept. They listened differently, however, and their respective views of mirroring and a mirror stage stand in stark opposition, marking their point of theoretical divergence and leading towards their opposing views reg