Chapter 9 The Bad Girl, The Good Girl, Their Mothers, and the Analyst: The Role of the Twinship Selfobject in Female Oedipal Development

If there is one lesson that I have learned during my life as an analyst, it is the lesson that what my patients tell me is likely to be true—that many times when I believed that I was right and my patients were wrong, it turned out, though often only after a prolonged search, that my rightness was superficial whereas their rightness was profound.

The theoretical understanding of the normal oedipal phase and the pathology that arises when the developmental steps of that period go awry have never been the primary focus of self psychology. In The Analysis of the Self (1971) Kohut discussed the role of narcissistic factors in the modification of phallic narcissism and the idealization of the superego but stated that development during and pathology derived from the oedipal phase were satisfactorily explained by classical theory. In The Restoration of the Self (1977) Kohut said that drive theory provides an incomplete but adequate basis for understanding the oedipal phase. In his depiction of the oedipal period from a self-psychological viewpoint, he emphasized the importance of pride and joy in the parents' response to the oedipal child's phase-appropriate sexual yearnings and competitive strivings for firming the child's independent self. Kohut speculated, “Could it not