Chapter 4 Empathy and Self-Expression: Confessions of a Sometimes Angry Self Psychologist

Self psychologically oriented analysts1 (in contrast to analysts of other analytic schools) tend to be particularly attuned to the developmentally based fragility of their patients' self-organization. These analysts tend to see their patients as requiring them to provide certain needed selfobject functions (including mirroring and idealizing) for prolonged periods of time, during which the patients are assumed to be unable to tolerate the direct (i.e., verbal) expression of the analyst's experience as a separate subjective “other.” While interpersonal, relational and other analysts have criticized self psychologists for underestimating their patients' resiliency in the face of nonempathic (let alone confrontational and aggressive) interventions, self psychologists as a group seem much more comfortable taking the risk of erring on the side of being “too empathic,” rather than risking doing harm to potentially vulnerable patients by imposing their own nonempathic subjectivity on the patient. The self psychology literature has numerous examples (see Trop and Stolorow, 1992; Teicholz, 1999) of analyses that lasted for long periods (sometimes