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At the first Conference on the Psychology of the Self in 1979, we presented a paper (Shane and Shane, 1980) on the development of the self. After reviewing the extant literature on self-development, we chose to focus on Kohut, Mahler, and Piaget as the most original and cogent contributors at that time. In particular, we hoped to find congruencies between the reconstructed view of development put forward by Kohut (1959, 1971, 1977, 1984) based on his self-psycho-logically informed analyses of adults, and the prospective view of development put forward by Mahler (1968; Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975) based on her classically informed observations on infants and toddlers. We looked to Piaget (1923; 1973; Piaget and Inhelder, 1966) to establish the cognitive limits on theoretical speculation. Our focus at the time was on the interesting tension established in gathering data about psychological phases of development from two different perspectives, the reconstructed and the directly observed. We minimized the differences in theoretical orientation because we wanted to establish a basis for a constructive integration among three creative approaches to understanding development, forming in that way an agreed upon delineation of an integrated psychoanalytic self, not a Kohutian self, nor a Freudian-Mahlerian self, nor a Piagetian self, but a self that might be acknowledged by all developmentally informed psychoanalysts as a beginning format for discussion, debate, and theoretical negotiation.
Since then much has changed. Psychoanalytic infant observation