In a few short years Kohut's first book, The Analysis of the Self , has had a far-reaching impact on the practice of psychoanalytic therapy. In retrospect, its principal importance was as a contribution to clinical psychoanalysis—specifically, to the understanding and treatment of those disturbances in self-experience that have been called narcissistic. As a contribution to psychological theory, it was marred by his attempts to graft his seminal clinical discoveries to the Procrustean bed of Freudian metapsychology and to present them in the language of traditional “mental-apparatus” psychology and “drive-discharge” theory. This criticism cannot be applied to his second book, The Restoration of the Self. In it the clinical discoveries described in the first book are refined, expanded, freed from the strictures of classical metapsychology, and boldly reformulated within a new theoretical framework.