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If neutrality and interpretive expertise are the hallmarks of Freud's psychoanalytic theories of technique, then empathy and introspection are the normative ideals for a psychology of the self. This is one of Heinz Kohut's major theses as he attempts to elaborate the foundations for a general psychology of the self in his work The Restoration of the Self. Kohut, elaborating on the contributions of the English object-relations school (a fact he seems strangely unable to acknowledge), is not only developing his thesis about the self and the self-objects and the role of transmuting internalizations, but also suggesting to the analytic community some new ideals.
One of his significant subthemes is a delineation of those personal-therapeutic qualities necessary for the analyst to understand and to treat those patients suffering from disorders of the self. A few quotations will highlight those qualities: “In my view, then, the essence of psychoanalysis lies in the scientific observer's protracted empathic immersion into the observed, for the purpose of data-gathering and explanation” (p. 302). And further: “We cannot, by introspection and empathy, penetrate to the self per se; only its introspectively or empathically perceived psychological manifestations are open to us” (p. 311).
Kohut persistently indicates the shortcomings of falling into any type of ideological orthodoxy in reference to Freudian metapsychology; he repeatedly shows how a theory of pathology and of technique which hears all of the patient's conflicts in terms of Oedipal triangles or sexual vicissitudes is seriously in danger of not hearing the patient at all. And, further, elaborating on contemporary phenomenological psychology (but, again, strangely not acknowledging it), he says: “The presence of an empathic or introspective observer defines, in principle, the psychological field” (p. 32).
While the French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty speaks of an understanding of the unconscious in terms of lateral dep