Chapter 4 Pathways to Integration: Adding to the Self Psychology Model

Our topic for this chapter is “Pathways to Integration,” but it could as well be “Pathways Back to Integration,” for in a sense integration is not new to self psychology at all. Its beginnings were in unity with classical analysis, a creative extension of the mainstream. And when Kohut, in The Restoration of the Self (1977), set self psychology on its new and independent course, the linkage to classical analysis was still maintained through the concept of complementarity. Over the subsequent years, and through the publication of his last posthumous book, even as Kohut more and more conceptualized self psychology as standing free of traditional analysis, he nevertheless maintained a connection to the mainstream. To our knowledge, he never dismissed the idea that basic training in analysis requires classical understanding of neurotic conflicts, defenses, and the dynamic unconscious. In extending psychoanalysis, he could not, and did not, break his ties with crucial and basic psychoanalytic knowledge. This is not to ignore the fact that Kohut's agenda was at first to cloak his new ideas in familiar terms in order to make them seem less foreign and more acceptable to the psychoanalytic establishment, and only later, and then somewhat gradually, to free self psychology from many outmoded psychoanalytic concepts. In this process, the self-in-the-narrow-sense and complementarity fell by the wayside. We believe that with this jettisoning effort vital aspects of mental functioning, essential to psychoanalysis,