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Atremendous interest exists on the part of mental health professionals as well as the general public in the topic of addiction in all its many and varied forms. It is surprising, therefore, and somewhat distressing, that until recently self psychology has been slow to follow Kohut in applying the principles of self psychology to addiction.
Scattered throughout Kohut's writings are numerous references to, passages about, and fuller contributions to the topic of addiction (see, e.g., Kohut, 1987, pp. 113-132). For instance, Kohut wrote the preface to a National Institute of Drug Abuse monograph entitled Psychodynamics of Drug Dependence, a fact unknown even to most self psychologists. This volume included contributions on addiction from leading psychoanalytic investigators such as Edward Khantzian, Herbert Wieder, Henry Krystal, Eugene Kaplan, William Frosch, and Harvey Milkman. In that preface Kohut (1977a, p. vii) wrote that the potential “explanatory power of the new psychology of the self” is particularly significant in the area of “the addictions.” We believe that our work (Ulman and Paul, 1989, 1990, forthcoming), and especially this present contribution, constitutes an important step in more fully realizing Kohut's vision of self psychology as contributing to a better psychoanalytic understanding of and approach to treating addictions.
Our present contribution consists of three parts: first, we review and update both our self-psychological theory of addiction and intersubjective approach to treating the addictive personality; second, we provide two necessarily abbreviated treatment case histories–Travis,