Foreword

When Heinz Kohut spoke at a Self Psychology Congress afterdinner program less than a decade ago (October 31, 1980), he wished the congress to enter into the proceedings with the uplifting spirit of “friendliness and a feeling of comradeship” akin to the self-state evoked by the gift of a fine wine—a “Chateau Lafitte” approach. His entreaty was aimed at inducing psychologists carrying all manner of gang colors to open up all their receptors and hear the new music of the self without running from the hall, aghast at the additions and alterations in psychoanalysis he and his collaborators were advancing.

Kohut and the early pioneers of self psychology (Michael Basch, Arnold Goldberg, Anna and Paul Ornstein, Marion and Paul Tolpin, Ernest Wolf) had been attempting since the 1960s to advance nothing less than a new humanism in psychoanalysis. The Kohutians petitioned psychoanalytic and all students of man to: (1) immerse themselves in the experiences of their patients, and (2) attend to the observed needs of the persons under their care—the shame, the aloofness, the vulnerability to rebuff, the fear of success, the fear of dying. Proceeding from these two precepts, Heinz and his collaborators were able to construct a model of the mind, a sequence of importance in the development of the self, and a model for psychotherapy—from supportive treatment to therapies aimed at changes in the self-and a general psychology to be of use in the study of man in literature, in the arts, in politics, and in the study of history. Kohut