The Birth of a Baby During Psychotherapy: A Perspective From Self Psychology*

Heinz Kohut's concepts of self and selfobject (1971, 1977) introduced a new premise to psychoanalysis—that subjectivity itself can be the focus of understanding, that it undergoes a process of development, and that the responses of others are profoundly implicated in that process. These concepts are often misunderstood. (A more comprehensive treatment of the concepts discussed in this introduction can be found in Wolfe [1989]). The terms “self” and “selfobject” do not refer to existents—that is, to persons, or interactions between persons—but to inner experiences. In Kohut's view, the very process of developing a self—that is, an experience of being a cohesive, enduring recipient of impressions and a center of volition—is a function of experiencing responses from others that contribute to such a development (1984, pp. 49-63, especially p. 52).

Kohut's realization that patients may attempt to strengthen and differentiate their self experience through their relationship with the therapist makes it possible to think about transference in a decisively different way. Rather than regarding transference as a displacement and projection of conflictual experiences from the past, transference can be seen as a necessary condition for the maintenance or restoration of self-experience and as “an archaic intersubjective context in which the patient's derailed psychological growth is permitted to resume once again” in the medium of the analyst's understanding (Stolorow, 1988, p. 252).

However, the idea that patients may seek from their therapists responses that are needed in order to complete a process of development