EPILOGUE

Part I

It is in the nature of a sauce to obscure some of its ingredients. Beyond the citations to Kohut in this issue, are there implicit themes that have been quietly integrated into the thinking and practice of the contributors. I believe this to be the case.

The analysts contributing to this issue (the contributors) share in having integrated the aspect of Kohut that is procedurally relational. Reis's use of Husserl's phenomenology as a lens to view Kohut establishes this formally. The other contributors make use of this perspective without commenting on it.

Carr and Cortina begin by linking Bowlby with Kohut in the belief that “responsiveness to a child's needs for comfort and protection plays a crucial role in the child's psychological development … of either healthy adjustment or psychopathology” (this issue, p. 42). And the ambience created by the contributors renders the (still vital) presumption that psychopathology derives from innate unconscious fantasies conspicuous by its absence. Malin makes explicit reference to Dr. A's abusive father and Mollon to Elizabeth's “sense of despair at feeling her life is not her own—and I relate this to her recurrent childhood experience” (this issue, p. 37). But the winning case is made by Kitron, eliciting a reader's identification with a traumatized child's need for a responsive parent: the girl who had to tell her story to her mother over and over again; and the boy who needed to have a supportive father or no father at all.

But belief that the roots of psychopathology, in developmental time,1 are in lived experience is not always accompanied the belief that a patient's subjectivity in clinical time derives from lived experience. Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange (2001) note that Fairbairn's theory shares with Kohut's the insistence that psychic structure derives from “early patterns of experienced interaction with others. … [Yet Fairbairn's] endopsychic world, once established, is … a mind whose dynamisms are insulated from