Chapter 1 Self Psychology and the Intersubjective Perspective: A Dialectical Critique

Because I consider them clinically valuable, especially in the understanding and resolution of therapeutic impasses in work with more difficult patients, I have for some time been troubled by what I see as significant epistemological and other theoretical problems in both self psychology (Kohut, 1959, 1971, 1977, 1979, 1984) and the intersubjective approach (Atwood and Stolorow, 1984a, 1984b; Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood, 1987; ). In the spirit of the depressive position, I will endeavor in the following “mixed review” to sustain ambivalence without splitting by indicating something of what I value as well as what I reject in these psychoanalytic perpectives.1

Although Kohut's method of argument, like Freud's, may be regarded as “dialectical” in the sense in which, deriving from the Greek dialektos meaning “discourse” and dialektike meaning “debate” (Concise Oxford Dictionary, p. 264), dialectic refers to reasoned argument as such, beyond this very general usage the concept is commonly associated with the dialectical logic of Hegel (1807; Singer, 1983). Here thought is held to evolve through the clash of opposites: a thesis gives rise to an