6 How Does Self Psychology Differ in Practice?

In two previous conferences devoted to self psychology—one in New York in December 1979, at the fall meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association (Wallerstein, 1981) and one in Boston in November 1980, under the auspices of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (Wallerstein, 1983a)—I presented in the first a clinical, and in the second a theoretical critique of the self psychology approach from within what I called the perspective of “classical” psychoanalytic psychology. The explicit point of reference for the first panel was Heinz Kohut's case of the two analyses of Mr. Z (Kohut, 1979) but the more overarching framework was the progressive unfolding of Kohut's conceptualizing in his two landmark books, The Analysis of the Self (1971), the expression of the psychology of the self in the narrower sense—as contents of the agencies of the mental apparatus, that is, as mental representations within the id, ego, and superego—and then The Restoration of the Self (1977), the statement of the psychology of the self in the broader sense, as a supraordinate constellation, with the drives and defenses subsumed as constituents of this self. This is what came to be called the bipolar self, in which, with maturation, normally self-assertive ambitions crystallize as one pole and attained ideals and values as the other—the two poles being connected by a tension arc of talents and skills.

We now have available for critical discussion and response, what has turned out to be Kohut's last and posthumous book. How Does Analysis Cure? (1984), which is a proper capstone to the clinical and theoretical edifice that he, together with his many colleagues and collaborators,