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Salee Jenkins is a good therapist. I am not just saying that as part of gratuitous praise with which to start a critique. If this case is generally indicative of her work and one of my own children asked for help in finding an analyst, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend her. That is the highest praise I can offer. So I will not be critiquing her clinical work. Focusing on empathy and interpretation, I will, however, question the theory she appears to have been using. I believe that Jenkins was actually reaching into her own reservoir of innate wisdom and using it to make essential modifications to an otherwise basically self psychological model. I will suggest that these modifications of the self psychological model were central to the therapeutic process. Let's see how we can understand this.
Laura entered analysis ridden with debilitating anxiety. Her early developmental history reveals very insecure attachments to both parents, a great deal of early isolation in the context of a superficially functional family, and early symptoms of phobias and compensatory obsessional thinking. All of this is consistent with a narcissistic personality disorder with marked defects in self structures and a need for self-selfobject experiences in primitive forms. Early on, this analysis