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Kohut (1984) in his last book How Does Analysis Cure? gave a detailed exposition of the self-psychological approach to defense and resistance analysis. He distinguished his from the traditional approach, in which defenses were associated with isolated mental functions that were governed by the pleasure principle and interfered with the analyst's efforts of making the unconscious conscious. Kohut articulated the view of defense that many of us have come to recognize in clinical practice, namely, that
defense … activities [are] undertaken in the service of psychological survival, that is, as the patient's attempt to save at least that sector of his nuclear self, however small and precariously established it may be, that he has been able to construct and maintain despite serious insufficiencies in the development-enhancing matrix of the selfobjects of his childhood [p. 115].
Defenses were to protect a defective self so “that it will be ready to grow again in the future, to continue to develop from the point in time at which its development had been interrupted” (p. 141).
With this view of the function of defenses, we have to ask ourselves: what is the most felicitous way of interpreting the unconscious defense elements in the patient's behavior that, on one hand, have become established to protect a vulnerable self and, on the other, constitute the most powerful obstacles to change?