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In this chapter three outstanding books, which are major contributions to the widening scope of self psychology, are reviewed: But as it happens, there is something else about these books that makes their being reviewed together especially stimulating and provocative. When Heinz Kohut was alive, he was often in the position of being asked by his detractors to defend what was actually creative in his creative efforts; it was argued that he did not identify, or even recognize, the historical psychoanalytic origins of his new ideas or the ways in which these new ideas continued to interdigitate with contemporaneous mainstream and alternative schools of thought. On the other side, there were those enthusiasts of self psychology who were excited by the fact that Kohut's ideas fit better with findings from infant observation and other ancillary disciplines than did the ideas of classical analysis and who encouraged Kohut to pay more attention in his own writings to these newer experimental data. Kohut chose to do neither. To the first group, the critics, Kohut responded that the time and scholarship required to trace either the origins of his ideas or the parallels to his ideas would distract him from the thrust of his own self-defining efforts and deter him from the