Chapter 3 Integrating Self Psychology and Classical Psychoanalysis: An Experience-Near Approach

The history of psychoanalysis has been characterized since its early beginnings by the formation of separate and insular schools of thought, divided from one another primarily along metapsychological lines, with little intercommunication or cross-fertilization among the differing viewpoints. A central thesis of this chapter is that psychoanalytic knowledge will be advanced if the clinical understandings obtained from differently situated points of view can be integrated into more encompassing frameworks. To that end, I will consider the formidable problem of integrating the perspectives of psychoanalytic self psychology and classical psychoanalysis. First, I will discuss a number of previous approaches to this problem and indicate why I believe these have not been successful. Second, I will propose two methodological principles through which integration can be approached. And third, I will describe my own attempt, in collaboration with Bernard Brand-chaft, to arrive at a more embracing viewpoint through the application of these methodological principles.

Certain preliminary grapplings with the question of integration were already implicit in Kohut's (1971) first book, The Analysis of the Self, a work that he later (personal communication) described as an attempt to “pour new wine into old bottles.” The new discoveries regarding disorders of the self and selfobject transferences were essentially integrated into the Procrustean bed of Freudian metapsychology and