Nuclearity

This article revisits Kohut’s concept of the nuclear self, a concept oft criticized as a reification, a relic of a bygone era that idealizes separateness and autonomy. In an alternative view, I interpret Kohut’s nuclear self not as a thing one carries along in one’s mind but as a story gathering shape over time through our interactions with others, closer to the Greek idea of fate than to Freud’s psychic apparatus. We are each of us heading through a series of transformations toward a surprising way of being that in the end feels preordained. A primary object of psychoanalysis is to track the sources and progress of this nuclear self. I coin the word “nuclearity” in contrast to Mitchell’s “relationality” and Freud’s “reality.” All three words describe a condition of the world as well as a value system, a way of thinking that shows us what we are looking for. This circularity is not a problem so long as we understand that the views we see from our viewpoints are constrained as though by literary genre. We can be truthful within a historical genre, but we cannot arrive at a final viewpoint from which to see everything. The genre or viewpoint of nuclearity is one in which the patient’s ever-evolving sense of coming into being organizes the psychoanalytic encounter.