Heinz Kohut and the Classical Psychoanalytic Tradition: An Analysis in Terms of Levels of Explanation

The basic problem of this article is to analyze how Heinz Kohut's psychology of the self is similar to and different from the classical psychoanalytic positions. The analysis will be accomplished, first, with the brief presentation of a model of the cognitive tradition in psychology and, second, with a more extensive presentation of a scheme of systematic levels of explanation found in Freud's and Kohut's formulations. Our main contention is that in The Analysis of the Self Kohut17 presented an exciting set of ideas that strained the classical psychoanalytic metapsychology almost to the breaking point and resulted in conceptual inconsistency and logical contraries at the level of theory (i.e., the metapsychology). Kohut18 has corrected those problems in The Restoration of the Self. An examination of how Freud and Kohut each use the cognitive tradition in psychology and, more importantly, their analysis by means of a level of explanation scheme (cf. Feigl6) permits us to examine where Kohut now remains similar to and extends the traditional psychoanalytic positions.

We will first present a brief description of Kohut's psychology of the self and some of its practical therapeutic implications by drawing mainly on The Restoration of the Self. Next we will present, again briefly, material on mental structures and processes in Freud and Kohut which derive from the general cognitive tradition in psychology. And last, we will present, for a finer grain analysis, our levels of explanation scheme and then apply it to an analysis of the formulations of Freud and Kohut.