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Arnold Goldberg (1982) has described the self of psychoanalysis as consisting of “permanent units of relationships” (p. 14). Goldberg adds that “the next step in the effort to delineate the forms of the self of analysis is one of describing the nature of the relationships that compose it” (p. 19). I have chosen these quotes from a self psychologist who is not ordinarily thought of as propounding a “relational” perspective in self psychology yet who is one of the foremost exponents of Kohut's work, partly to lend substance to my view (see Bacal and Newman, 1990) that self psychology has always been a relational theory despite its generally remarkable avoidance of conceptualizing itself as such, and partly because, with few exceptions, the articles in this volume of Progress in Self Psychology give chapter and verse to “the next step” that Goldberg identifies as the next task for self psychology.
Self psychology is, in effect, a psychology of the individual's experience in the context of relatedness (see Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). In contrast to some other relational theories—such as so-called “object-relations” theory—it focuses on experience, in the context of relationship, rather than on the relationship per se. Thus, self psychology is also centrally a psychoanalytic psychology of the “subjective,” a view that Heinz Kohut (1959) presaged long before he formally developed a definitive psychology of the self. In particular, what distinguishes self psychology from other relational theories is its attention to the subjectively experienced state of the self, from which we infer its cohesion, strength, and vitality, which are determined by the nature and quality of its selfobject relationships. In my view, the selfobject concept—the core concept in self psychology