Chapter 13 The Selfobject Concept: A Further Discussion of Three Authors

Each of the authors of the three major new books on self psychology, as Estelle Shane so comprehensively and clearly delineated, is expanding and refining the theory' and clinical practice of self psychology (or, perhaps more accurately, the theories and clinical practices of self psychology). In his disarmingly straightforward and elegant writing about the treatment of the self, Wolf (1988) creates an empathic ambience for the reader, illustrative of the type of ambience that is an important ingredient of the self-psychological psychoanalytic endeavor. Bacal and Newman (1990), in their “mutually regulating” interweaving of self psychology and object relations theory, expand self-psychological theory and, buttressing their argument with a tightly reasoned and clinically based perspective, firmly anchor self psychology as a two-person psychology. And in his synthesis of infant research, psychoanalytic theories, and clinical evidence, Lichtenberg (1989) provides us with a comprehensive and detailed motivational model, undoubtedly the most conceptually parsimonious, explanatory, and elegant motivational model in psychoanalysis today, that serves as a basis for understanding self-experience and the genesis of self-structure. Clearly, self psychology is alive and well as the differences abound and the theory evolves. In this chapter I wish to consider briefly some of the complex issues related to bridging self psychology and object relations theory and to focus particularly on the selfobject concept as viewed by these different authors.

Although Kohut legitimized self concerns by extricating them from