You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The title of Merton Gill's chapter, “Heinz Kohut's Self Psychology,” implies that he intends to focus on self psychology and, most particularly, on that version of self psychology he calls “mainstream.” Gill is true to his purpose. Indeed, he comments on every important topic in self psychology: the superordinate self, selfobjects, selfobject transferences, motivation, the role of drives, complementarity, conflict, deficit, empathy, and principles of therapeutic action. And he reports that as a result of his study he has emerged significantly more respectful of self psychology than when he began. Good!
Gill does not limit discussion to the past, to Heinz Kohut's self psychology, which for him exemplifies mainstream self psychology. He recognizes that streams move and that the psychology of the self has not remained static since Kohut's death in 1981. It is no longer—if it ever was—Heinz Kohut's self psychology.
Gill thus addresses what he refers to as nonmainstream self psychology, exemplified by the ideas of Arnold Goldberg and Robert Stolorow. In that part of his chapter, however, Gill's primary interest seems to shift from topics specific to self psychology to a broader domain: the epistemological problems inherent in the exploration of psychological depths.
So many issues are covered in Gill's chapter that I cannot address them all. Much of the paper speaks to basic epistemological questions relevant to psychoanalysis in general. But those issues are not specific to self psychology; they are secondary to the main topic. Since it is not