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It is a rare occurrence in the psychoanalytic field that an investigator presents us with a new perspective and an added dimension for our understanding of personality in depth. Yet this is precisely what Heinz Kohut has done in this original and imaginative book, The Restoration of the Self. He draws upon his clinical experience to validate a mode of observation different from the usual “objective” stance of the psychoanalyst who supposedly stands outside the therapeutic relationship looking in. For him an introspective-empathic stance in which the analyst observes from within the interactional framework of the therapeutic situation is essential for an understanding of the self—a self which was initially formed and structured within the confines of the earliest parent-child relationship. Because of this interpersonal genesis of the self, it differs from the drives, which represent the biological givens of personality, and requires both a different manner of observation and a new self-psychology.
Kohut draws upon his experience with narcissistic personality disorders for the development of a psychology of the self. Yet he abandons neither Freudian drive theory nor the structural concept of personality, arguing that these are necessary for the understanding of the structural neuroses whose central characteristic is the presence of intrapsychic conflict, whereas in the case of the narcissistic personality disorders the presence of actual deficits in the cohesion of the self is at issue. Out of this causal duality Kohut comes to the conclusion that two complementary theories of personality are needed: a structural theory and a self psychology.