Chapter 4 Straddling Two Revolutions: A Discussion of Hazel Ipp's Clinical Case

The question put before these commentators was “How do the clinical choices and therapeutic actions evident in Dr. Hazel Ipp's case exemplify post-Kohutian contributions to self psychological theory?” In responding to this question I found Judith Teicholz's (1999) recent book Kohut, Loewald, and the Postmoderns: A Comparative Study of Self and Relationship to be a particularly useful resource. Her book instructs us about the crucial impact of Kohut's revolutionary departure from the classical ego psychology of his day, which, subsequently, has been profoundly influenced by another revolution, that which Teicholz identifies as the postmodern influence of the relational and intersubjective perspectives.1 As Teicholz (1998) points out, the ink on Kohut's revolution was not even dry, before it was undergoing this second revolution. In the wake of the sea changes of these two sequential revolutions, not only are no stones left unturned in American psychoanalysis, as is true to postmodernism, but we keep turning these stones over and over and over. Teicholz (1999) writes, the postmodern involves “a rigorous questioning of all that has been used or taken for granted in the past … [and] also a questioning of the very process of trying to find new ways of doing and understanding” (p. 4).