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It is likely that Kohut was referring to his own experience when he wrote (1984), “One of the conditions for the maintenance of a cohesive self as one faces death is the actual or at least vividly imagined presence of empathically responsive selfobjects” (p. 19). The general applicability of Kohut's insight is here illustrated in the treatment of a dying patient. The value of a tie with the therapist facilitates a selfobject experience, which in turn provides a sense of cohesion and continuity that helps to contain, manage, and buffer emotional suffering and psychic conflict that can emerge with ensuing death.
In his most thorough description of selfobject experience, Kohut explained (1984):
Throughout his life a person will experience himself as a cohesive harmonious firm unit in time and space, connected with his past and pointing meaningfully into a creative-productive future, only as long as, at each stage in his life, he experiences certain representatives of his human surroundings as joyfully responding to him, as available to him as sources of idealized strength and calmness, as being silently present but in essence like him, and, at any rate, able to grasp his inner life more or less accurately so that their responses are attuned to his needs and allow him to grasp their inner life when his is in need of sustenance [p. 52].