Chapter 1 Self Psychology Since Kohut

This paper is in the nature of a historical progress note. For many students of psychoanalytic psychology, the advent of self psychology was an interesting moment in the growth and development of depth psychology, one that began with the publications of Heinz Kohut and that continues on with the adoption of several of his ideas and concepts. Most psychoanalysts do not keep up with the literature of self psychology, and most have only a casual acquaintance with its vocabulary and even less familiarity with its internal struggles. Kohut's original aim for self psychology, to have an established place within organized psychoanalysis, has given way to its rather surprising emergence embodied in a solid group of clinicians and investigators outside of the psychoanalysis that Kohut knew. This emergence has been accompanied by conflicts, disagreements, and, perhaps predictably, different branches. That a significant partisanship has arisen within the domain of self psychology is one of those inevitable events that plague much of psychoanalysis, but it should not conceal the fact that self psychology itself has seemed to travel along distinctly different ideological lines.

It is always difficult to lift out the pure theoretical concepts from the political surround, but there does seem to be a rather clear clustering of concepts that differ from one another while still claiming an allegiance to self psychology, an origin from self psychology, as well as an advance of and beyond self psychology. Only one of these branches has a definite name, that is, intersubjectivity, and so one is immediately at a disadvantage in pursuing an effort to single out and describe these other chosen branches without falling into the political pitfalls of