Introduction

In his final paper, “Introspection, Empathy, and the Semi-Circle of Mental Health” (Kohut, 1982), written just before his death, Kohut ended with the statement that, for analysis to stay alive and reach its destiny, “It must turn from the study of Freud to the study of man” (p. 405). Now, some 18 years since those words were written, there are some who would say that, for self psychology to stay alive and reach its destiny, it must turn from the study of Kohut to the study of the self. The nature of that self and how it can best be studied is the central theme that runs through this volume of Progress in Self Psychology.

In that same paper, Kohut fired his final broadside at Freud, whom he referred to as the ultimate maker of psychoanalytic myths, the foremost one being the myth of a universal oedipal neurosis. After recasting the Oedipus story in self psychological terms as the story of an abandoned child, Kohut then playfully offered his own countermyth. He told the story of Odysseus and how he saved the life of his infant son, Telemachus, at great cost to himself. The Odysseus myth, he argued, was closer to the true nature of normal human psychology. Human beings are motivated by a deep need to preserve and sustain the next generation, not by infanticide, patricide, and incest. Kohut had no illusions that his Odysseus myth would replace Freud's Oedipus, but he did nonetheless leave us with a powerful legacy: the legacy of a central motivating structure and internal program, the nuclear self.

Another legacy Kohut left us is the idea that our most precious analytic theories, including his own, are also forms of mythology. Today, when a new idea is advanced, the prior model is referred to as a myth, for example, “the myth of the isolated mind” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992).