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Virginia Hunter's “Interview with Ernest Wolf” in the Winter 1992 number of your journal has recently come to my attention. In that article, Hunter elicited Wolfs personal opinions (about my psychoanalytic views and certain of my motives in relation to other psychoanalysts) that depreciate my work and cast unwarranted aspersions on my character. As it is highly unusual for a scientific publication to print such material about a living person, I trust you will allow me briefly to respond to these allegations.
The distortions I wish to correct are introduced without any serious misstatement of fact about external events; I am even willing to grant that Wolf probably tried his best to compliment me both in his estimate of my talents and in accepting me as a fellow “self psychologist.” However, Wolf is simply inaccurate in saying that I have not “strayed” from the position he imagines I developed in working with Kohut; over the past two decades, my views have changed radically, and I never did collaborative work or reach consensus with the founder of “self psychology.” No member of that movement has ever commented on the 10 books I have published since Wolf and I parted company, and I seriously doubt that any “self psychologist” has bothered to follow the evolution of my ideas.
Wolf attempts to dismiss the importance of my intellectual disagreements with Kohut by asserting that I left the group preparing the casebook (published as The Psychology of the Self) because of an inability to take criticism of my clinical work. How did Wolf arrive at this arbitrary conclusion? Was he present at the private discussions between Kohut and me which convinced me that our differences were irreconcilable? In fact, I do not understand where Wolf got the idea that anyone in that group was critical of my clinical reports —the worst said about them was that they did not describe