Chapter 19 The Therapeutic Partnership: A Developmental View of Self-Psychological Treatment as Bilateral Healing

Of self psychology's many transformative contributions, none has had more far-reaching clinical, theoretical, and sociocultural implications than its “decisive shift of emphasis away from a preoccupation with the pathological and toward a focus on the potentially healthy or more adaptive aspects of the personality” (Ornstein, 1980, p. 137). Elaborating on Ornstein's observation that the “new conception of health and illness” contained in Heinz Kohut's writings is fundamentally developmental, Stolorow (1980) observed that health is formulated by self psychologists “in terms of the epigenesis of self experience, the progressive transformation of archaic selfobject constellations as they evolve throughout the formative years through the requisite empathic responsiveness of caretakers to the child's changing psychological requirements” (p. 162).