Preface

Given the rapid proliferation of theory and techniques in self psychology, various examples of which are represented in this volume, I am inclined to offer a comment based on a long-term view of the implications of some of these ideas. I think it is useful to recall that when Heinz Kohut began his paradigm-shifting work on narcissism, he was operating from within the “one mind” perspective of ego psychology, an unabashedly modernist, objectivist position that viewed the psychological data at issue in psychoanalysis as “inside the head” of the analysand. As the complexities of the “widening scope” began to reveal themselves in the actual clinical psychoanalytic endeavor, however, it became increasingly difficult to maintain that position; even Kohut's emphasis on the “subjectivity” of the patient began to yield increasingly to the impact (and hence role) of the analyst's subjectivity, the implications of self-disclosure by the analyst, and the intersubjective context of analysis. Rapidly, as our selection of patients with more archaically organized developmental derailments began to increase (and our ability to recognize these issues also increased), there evolved a growing emphasis on the idea that manipulating the actuality of the dyadic relation in psychoanalysis could be mutative—in large part, I believe, because of the often overwhelming difficulties that occurred in attempting to access primitive, split-off states and subject them to “analysis” in the usual sense. It became, in other words, much more difficult to properly apply “analytic” principles to instances in which the pathology in question was often characterized by global archaic (and often negative) transferences, which were extremely difficult to interpret without major disruption of narcissistic equilibriium and that were also often embroiled with severe character pathology. The increasing emphasis of those theories that shift the focus of emphasis