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Self psychologists have become identified with a theoretical standpoint that emphasizes the subjective experience of a “self”—feeling supported and cohesive or nonsupported and susceptible to disintegration—allegedly slighting attention to the relational aspects of treatment. Yet when I presented the foregoing comment to a number of sophisticated self psychology clinicians, they invariably replied that concerns about the therapeutic relationship and the quality of the therapist's responsiveness consistently inform their work. Howard Bacal, whose writing provides the conceptual framework of this chapter, comments (1995a) on this discrepancy between theory and practice:
While “officially” self psychologists address only self-experience, both their written and their verbal communications are replete with references about the importance to the analysand of the experience of his or her connection to the analyst as selfobject [p. 360; emphasis original].
Further,
What Kohut did not explicitly include in his theory (although there is ample evidence throughout his writing to indicate that he understood otherwise) is that [self psychology] is not only a psychology of the self, it is also quintessentially a psychology of human relatedness [pp. 359-360; emphasis added].
Given the penchant of self-psychological writing to precede references to human objects with such phrases as “the experience of,” “the function