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The internalization of a “good” selfobject can reinstate the natural process of the continuity of intergenerational mutuality that Kohut emphasized in the last paper written before his death (Kohut, 1982). That the need for a sense of and belief in the possibility of intergenerational continuity is an essential part of humanness was stressed by Kohut in this paper when he said,
healthy man experiences, and with deepest joy, the next generation as an extension of his own self. It is the primacy of the support for the succeeding generation, therefore, which is normal and human, and not intergenerational strife and mutual wishes to kill…. It is only when the self of the parent is not a normal, healthy self, cohesive, vigorous, and harmonious, that it will react with competitiveness and seductiveness rather than with pride and affection when the child, at the age of 5, is making an exhilarating move toward a heretofore not achieved degree of assertiveness, generosity and affection. And it is in response to such a flawed parental self which cannot resonate with the child's experience in empathic identification that the newly constituted assertive-affectionate self of the child disintegrates and that the break-up products of hostility and lust of the Oedipus complex make their appearance (Kohut, 1982, p. 404).
Kohut, reinterpreting the oedipal myth, stressed that Oedipus was “a rejected child … Oedipus was not wanted by his parents and that he was abandoned in the wilderness to die” (Kohut, 1982, p. 404). In contrast to this failure of loving parenting, Kohut cited Homer's story of Odysseus who saved his infant son's life at the risk of his own, thus manifesting intergenerational caring rather than the pathological fear and jealousy, which, in the oedipal story, destroys both generations.
Some years ago, before Kohut introduced his concept of intergenerational continuity but after I had begun to consider some of the problems posed by deficits in self development and Kohut's