Chapter 1 Introduction: Is Self Psychology on a Promising Trajectory?

How do we determine whether our discipline, our field of endeavor, the clinical-empirical science in which we are all active participants, is or is not on a promising developmental path? I do not know a satisfactory answer — perhaps one can only find that out retrospectively — but I do sense that the question is vital and that our periodic critical reflections on it may serve as a compass to keep us on the right course.

Our first task, then, is to find a few appropriate criteria around which an assessment of where we are and where we are heading might be possible. In the search for such criteria, we soon realize that they form two clusters: one relating to external successes, the other to intrinsic potentialities of self psychology. The first cluster includes those issues that lend themselves to historical-descriptive statements of self psychology or to the quantitative measurements of a statistical study (e.g., reflecting the evidence of changes in the level of interest in self psychology in this country and worldwide). The second cluster includes those issues that require a conceptual analysis of the foundational principles of self psychology and an estimate of its contemporary relevance and future prospects. These two clusters are not unrelated to each other. Measurable popularity and clinical-theoretical relevance may well be linked in some way (we hope), but it would require a sophisticated social psychological and historical research approach combined to pinpoint their precise relationship in the case of self psychology and its evident successes.