Progress in Self Psychology, V. 9

The Widening Scope of Self Psychology

Arnold I. Goldberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780881631630
• eBook ISBN: 9781134888658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Widening Scope of Self Psychology is a watershed in the self-psychological literature, being a contemporary reprise on several major clinical themes through which self psychology, from its inception, has articulated its challenge to traditional psychoanalytic thinking. The volume opens with original papers on interpretation by eminent theorists in the self-psychological tradition, followed by a series of case studies and clinically grounded commentaries bearing on issues of sex and gender as they enter into analysis. Two thoughtful reexaminations of the meaning and treatment challenges of chronic rage are followed by clinical papers that focus, respectively, on mourning, alter ego transferences, resistance to change, and pathological identification. Applied analytic contributions and a review of Goldberg's The Prisonhouse of Psychoanalysis round out a collection that testifies not only to the widening scope of self psychology, but to its deepening insights as well.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Is Self Psychology on a Promising Trajectory?

Paul H. Ornstein

How do we determine whether our discipline, our field of endeavor, the clinical-empirical science in which we are all active participants, is or is not on a promising developmental path? I do not know a satisfactory answer—perhaps one can only find that out retrospectively—but I do sense that the question is vital and that our periodic critical reflections on it may serve as a compass to keep us on the right course.

Our first task, then, is to find a few appropriate criteria around which an assessment of where we are and where we are heading might be possible. In the search for such criteria, we soon realize that they form two clusters: one relating to external successes, the other to intrinsic potentialities of self psychology. The first cluster includes those issues that lend themselves to historical—descriptive statements of self psychology or to the quantitative measurements of a statistical study (e.g., reflecting the evidence of changes in the level of interest in self psychology in this country and worldwide). The second cluster includes those issues that require a conceptual analysis of the foundational principles of self psychology and an estimate of its contemporary relevance and future prospects. These two clusters are not unrelated to each other. Measurable popularity and clinical–theoretical relevance may well be linked in some way (we hope), but it would require a sophisticated social psychological and historical research approach combined to pinpoint their precise relationship in the case of self psychology and its evident successes.

While I have chosen to focus mainly on some elements of the second cluster—which I view as the more significant one for the long run–I want to say a few words in passing about the first because the data, even without a formal statistical study, are reassuring (and uplifting) for those who have labored under the banner of self psychology during the last two decades.

Both interest in and knowledge about self psychology have been gaining ground in all mental health fields and simultaneously in, though at a slower pace, the humanities. Relevant articles in various publications, the selection of topics at the scientific meetings of diverse mental health groups, the popularity of CME credit courses nationwide that feature self psychology, the steadily increasing demand for training and for self-psychologically informed therapists all over the country–all attest to the increase in interest in and the spread of knowledge about self psychology. Closer to home, the expansion of the National Council for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology with its regional small study groups, the continuation of our own annual meetings with impressive attendance, the ensuing annual volumes of Progress in Self Psychology, the frequently appearing and eagerly bought books by self psychologists on self psychology—these developments are rightly considered by insiders as well as outsiders to be the most directly visible signs of activity on a promising track. But all this must be familiar to each of you. What you might not fully realize, however, is what has been happening worldwide.

As I thought of writing about the decisive increase in interest, enthusiasm, and actual knowledge of self psychology in Germany, some revival of interest in Holland and Switzerland, the efforts under way to make contact with a small group of analysts in England, the increasingly intensive teaching of self psychology and clinical supervision in Paris, the ongoing teaching of self psychology at the University of Budapest, the small active group in Italy, and the budding serious interest in the Scandinavian countries emanating from Oslo, it occurred to me how informative it would be to have representatives of each of these countries report to us at one of our conferences on what they have achieved in their respective countries thus far and on what they are contemplating for the future. Outside of Europe, the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, as well as other mental health professionals there, has become more actively inquisitive about self psychology. The Japanese have translated selected essays from the first two volumes of The Search for the Self (Ornstein, 1978). In Thailand there appear to be a lively interest and serious study of self psychology. Sydney has long been a stronghold of self psychology in Australia, and Perth, at the other end of that continent, is now uniting with New Zealand in organizing a psychotherapy society that puts self psychology into the center of its clinical and theoretical orientation. We are beginning to forge a link to China via Taiwan, where some self psychology literature will soon be translated into Chinese. The surprise is the extent to which an earlier definite but still limited interest in self psychology from Kleinian South America has escalated within the last two or three years. In Mexico this expansion has reached unexpected proportions: the Psychoanalytic Society in Mexico City observed the tenth anniversary of Heinz Kohut's death with a symposium on self psychology presented entirely by its own members. The details and special circumstances surrounding this increase of interest in self psychology from each of the countries I mentioned are fascinating and instructive, but we shall have to wait to learn about them on some future occasion.

I now turn to the second cluster of criteria, some of the intrinsic elements of the self psychology paradigm, to pursue the question of whether self psychology is on a promising developmental path or not. The answer–I do not want to keep you in suspense—is a resounding YES. And in the following pages I shall try to explain why.

The idea of a trajectory has been with me for quite some time, but I recall that Brandchaft (1986) supplied me with the word when he said the following in Toronto: “If in fact Heinz Kohut made it possible for us to see and understand more of human experience and the psychoanalytic process than before, it is important that this growing body of work follow its trajectory toward the realization of its own potential” (p. 246; italics added). What is this trajectory and how shall we know whether we are moving toward the realization of its potential? Is there only one well-defined and agreed-upon trajectory for self psychology or are there several competing ones, without much agreement between us about them? On these pages I only focus on Kohut's self psychology, but I shall return later to a brief discussion of the issue of multiple trajectories. In order to consider these questions I focus first on some aspects of the genesis of self psychology and then on some characteristics of its clinical and theoretical system as a whole in the hope of identifying what has put it and what may keep it on a promising trajectory.

SOME ASPECTS OF THE GENESIS OF SELF PSYCHOLOGY

When I once asked Heinz Kohut what enabled him to move into new directions so soon after he began his analytic career, he paused for a moment and said that by the time he was in his early twenties he had read, digested, and made his own all that Freud had written and was thus able to move on from there. Subsequent conversations and various additional remarks in his writings expanded on this off-the-cuff response. Aspects of his own childhood experiences (about which he spoke at times with analytic reflection), his enormous erudition and wide general reading, and his extensive clinical experience—in other words, his own childhood and adult life-story—in combination with his unique talent for introspective-empathic observation and theorizing enabled Kohut, within a particular historical period in psychoanalysis and the surrounding Zeitgeist, to formulate his self psychology in various stages over a period of about 15 years.

The potential for such specific creative developments is perhaps innate and can be discovered in its then-unrecognized early manifestations throughout the period prior to its full fruition in a retrospective scrutiny, once enough relevant life history data become available. My own focus for tracing Kohut's developing ideas on the self has not been his life history but only his early psychoanalytic writings (and his frequent personal communications about them), which permit a step-by-step tracing of the evolving system of self psychology in the process of its gradual unfolding and articulation.

There are, however—on this we would all agree—two thoroughly intertwined aspects of the development of Kohut's ideas whose respective contributions will have to be considered separately in any comprehensive study in order to enable us to put self psychology some day into a proper historical perspective. One aspect relates to the “nuclear program” laid down in Kohut in response to his endowment and the specific life experiences within his family and the Viennese, as well as the broader European, culture of his time. This is undoubtedly the source or wellspring of his unique contributions. The other aspect relates to the influences of the contexts in which Kohut actually worked–the narrow one of Chicago; the broader one of psychoanalysis as a whole; and the even broader one of the spirit of his time, the Zeitgeist–all of which codetermined the form and content of his scientific work.

I shall make some brief comments on these contexts to exemplify what I mean. Hartmannian ego psychology and Alexander's biologizing and sociologizing of psychoanalysis had a clearly acknowledged impact on the timing and form of Kohut's (1959) well-known methodologic-epistemologic essay, “On Introspection, Empathy and Psychoanalysis.” Kohut was convinced that these influences were distorting the essence of psychoanalysis. The deeper emotional and intellectual roots of the main points of the essay converge on Kohut's view of reality (external as well as internal reality), namely, that it is in principle unknowable and that we can only grasp aspects of it on the basis of the specific operation(s) we apply to it in the process of our inquiry. Hence the fundamental importance of the method, as reflected in the subtitle of the essay: “An Examination of the Relationship Between Mode of Observation and Theory.” Kohut grew up with this modern, postpositivist, view of reality. It had become so much a part of him that he took it for granted and incorrectly assumed that all psychoanalysts shared it. It had become a foundation of his thinking and it informed his view of psychoanalysis as an empirical science. And since Kohut was thus not a radical empiricist, holding that we could ultimately know reality as it actually existed out there, his notion of psychoanalysis as an empirical science could still accommodate, without apparent contradiction, the postpositivist “constructionist” (i.e., hermeneutic, or interpretive) view of reality, in which the observer had a direct and definite impact on the observed and in which a jointly forged reality emerged as a result.

The 1959 essay thus established the psychoanalytic method afresh¹ and shifted its epistemology more decisively away from conventional, positivist science, of which medicine, psychiatry, and even psychoanalysis were a part. The essay also marked the actual beginning— although with some latency period in its wake–of Kohut's later systematic study of the self and its disorders. The latency period provided him, as president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, with experiences regarding the “group self” of the association, and these gave an immediate external impetus to his recognition of the need to study the vulnerabilities of the self as he observed them there and also in his clinical practice.

I regard Kohut's 1959 essay as a significant part of the “genetic endowment” of self psychology, a part of its “nuclear program.” What I mean is this: What Kohut established in the methodologic– epistemologic realm—like it or not—significantly determined the path on which he put the future development of self psychology. I will not recount the details of the essay and what followed it. It should be enough to remark that these methodologic–epistemologic innovations began to transform psychoanalysis from a 19th-century mechanistic, objectivist-positivist theory into a 20th-century constructivist-contextualist one. Kohut's brand of psychoanalysis was therefore, even before any of its further developments, already on a promising, avant-garde path.²

Let us now take a quick look at some of the characteristics of the clinical–theoretical system Kohut proposed a few years later to see the further outlines of the trajectory of self psychology and to see if it is indeed in the process of fulfilling its potential.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CLINICAL AND THEORETICAL SYSTEM OF SELF PSYCHOLOGY

Kohut's method and epistemologic stance proved extremely fruitful. Jointly and inseparably, these have led to a new paradigm in psychoanalysis. This is now past history. The method and the epistemology in which this paradigm is embedded have created an open clinical-theoretical system. From within this open system, with its core concepts of the selfobject and the selfobject transferences, we are able to maintain a continuous dialogue with the patients of today, as well as with the surrounding culture, and to become ever more attuned to both. Out of this ongoing dialogue we can fill in, expand, and modify the details of the basic paradigm until it has fulfilled its potentialities and can give way to a new one. His method and epistemology might be the most enduring part of Kohut's entire system not to mention the clinical insights it has helped us attain, which I think are considerable and at this point appear quite durable.

As you know, self psychology first emerged out of Kohut's focus on what he called “the leading psychopathology of our time.” It was this aspect of The Analysis of the Self (Kohut, 1971) that spoke to all who immediately grasped his message. It was the thrust of his approach from the outset to be in tune with and understand, as well as explain, the psychopathology and the psychology of our time, just as Freud understood and explained the leading psychopathology and the psychology of the Victorian age. Kohut decisively moved further toward this goal with The Restoration of the Self (Kohut, 1977), which encompassed the whole spectrum of psychopathology, and continued in this direction in all his subsequent writings.

Self psychology thus became psychoanalysis at its best. We no longer assumed that we could find “the truth” about the human condition, valid for all times and throughout all cultures; that was a mirage. We now had a more modest agenda but one no less important or less encompassing: a renewed and intensified focus, using the method of empathy, on individual subjective experience within the selfobject transferences and use of clinical findings beyond the clinical setting to study men and women in history.

Had Kohut only captured the essence of the psychology and psychopathology of our time, his permanent place in the annals of psychoanalysis would already have been assured. But I believe he did much more. And this is where I see self psychology on a promising trajectory and in the process of fulfilling its potentialities—without an end in sight yet! (Kohut was fond of saying that we have barely scratched the surface thus far.)

The clinical concept of the selfobject transferences and the developmental concept of selfobject needs and experiences—that is, the vicissitudes of the selfobject phenomena throughout life–are the foundational constructs of self psychology from which all the rest derives. These concepts have, in turn, further anchored psychoanalysis in the postpositivist, constructivist reality and have thereby restored to it its erstwhile revolutionary power in the human sciences. Let me explain: these concepts have led us to view the self, among other things, as an open system, one that is not delimited by the physical boundaries, the skin, of the person. Thus, the self is open to include others or to be included in the self of others. This view has permitted us to transcend the concept of transference as a phenomenon played out between two well-demarcated selves each of whom is the recipient of projections and introjections in the transference– countertransference experience within the closed system of each participant in the analytic process. The new psychoanalysis has, Kohut held, turned away from focusing on macro-events within the life cycle as the key pathogenic elements and focuses instead on the micro-experiences surrounding them. It has also turned away from regarding the macro-structures of id, ego, and superego as adequately accounting for subjective experience and pathogenesis. The new approach rivets our analytic attention on the micro-structures of self-experience, the level on which development and the treatment process can be more adequately accounted for.

Self psychology is on a promising trajectory because it is open to an ever-deepening grasp of the psychology and psychopathology of our time, as well as in harmony with the contemporary postpositivist, contextualist, constructivist philosophy of science.

No one among us—whichever trajectory he or she follows—seems to doubt the central significance of the concepts of the selfobject and the selfobject transferences. But among the various trends within self psychology, about which much more can be said than can be included here, different clinical and theoretical elements are stressed, leading to different emphases and therefore to different trajectories.

Let me, therefore, mention a few of the consequences I consider important, even at the risk of talking about the very familiar. (1) Although Kohut's thinking in the 1959 paper replaced the awkward psychobiological concept of the drives with a psychological concept of subjective drivenness, it was only the selfobject concept that clearly established a substitute motivational (developmental and clinical) context and could therefore more meaningfully and persuasively do away with classical drive theory and pave the way for a substitution of it with an affect theory congenial to self psychology.³ The previous psychoanalytic paradigms, bar none, have not achieved this transformation sufficiently, even if some could be viewed, retrospectively, as having inched toward it. The second step was largely missing; these paradigms did not offer a compelling substitute for drive theory derived from the transference. (2) The selfobject concept brought together within the self external and internal reality more felicitously than did previous approaches and thereby put contextuality (the idea of meaning as established in context) in the center of the psychoanalytic theory and treatment process. In this connection the idea of a one-person, versus a two- or three-person, psychology, initiated by Rickman and taken over by Balint as a corrective measure, appears to me now as so...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Progress in Self Psychology
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgment
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Is Self Psychology on a Promising Trajectory?
• I INTERPRETATION
• II SEX AND GENDER
• III AGGRESSION AND RAGE
• IV CLINICAL
• V APPLIED
• Author Index
• Subject Index