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We are very grateful to the contributors of “The Many Faces of Self Psychology” for providing a group of articles which, individually and collectively, honor Kohut’s original contributions while offering new and creative ideas, thus expanding the depth and breadth of contemporary self-psychology. Joye Weisel-Barth and Daniel Goldin open the issue each providing articles that focus on stories about the importance of story-telling for psychoanalysis. Both Weisel-Barth and Goldin include a focus on the processes of coming into being in the psychoanalytic encounter. In an important contribution, Goldin reconceptualizes Kohut’s ideas about the nuclear self.
The next article by Martin Gossmann convincingly demonstrates the sustaining value of Kohut’s contributions to psychoanalysis. He also raises an important question concerning a trend within self-psychology to increasingly focus on relational processes which Gossmann fears may come at the expense of losing touch with a patient’s deepest concerns. This point is discussed by Carr and Shane in part two of their discussion.
In the following article, Richard Geist provides a kind of master class on contemporary thinking by describing the important clinical attitudes that are central to a self-psychological way of working which exude hope and the possibility of transformation. Importantly, Geist provides a fully two-person model, moving beyond Kohut, by emphasizing the importance of appreciating intersubjective processes related to permeable boundaries between patient’s and analyst’s subjective experiences.
Next, Koichi Togashi and Amanda Kottler build on their growing body of work in exploring and expanding Kohut’s ideas about the twinship self-object experience. Their scholarship contributes both to new understandings regarding Kohut’s formulations as well as to new understandings about the interpenetrating nature of shared intergenerational trauma in the clinical encounter.
Marie Hellinger and Elizabeth Carr review Kohut’s vi