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The power of the selfobject theory of motivation has exceeded the hopes of even its originator. Kohut was confident that his contribution had widened the scope of psychoanalysis to include narcissistic personality disorders, but he believed that neither borderline nor psychotic disorders could be analytically treated (Kohut, 1971). Those disorders reflected a basic lack of cohesion of the self and were therefore considered to be beyond the pale of psychoanalysis.
The work of Adler, Atwood, Brandchaft, Lachmann, and Stolorow apparently persuaded Kohut that borderline problems were, after all, potentially available to psychoanalysis, for he mentions this possibility, albeit quite cautiously, in How Does Analysis Cure? (1984). But here are two contributions giving the clinical evidence that the pathology of psychotic patients can now be understood in the framework of the selfobject transference and successfully analyzed. How can this be? How can patients who do not have a cohesive self respond to the demands of the analytic situation? According to our theory, these patients are not anxious about the danger of fragmentation of the self; they are fragmented, or in a state bordering on fragmentation,