The Search for the Self

Volume 3: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut 1978-1981

Heinz Kohut, Paul Ornstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780367328733
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429922114
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

'The re-issuing of the four volumes of the author's writings is a major publishing event for psychoanalysts who are interested in both the theoretical and the therapeutic aspects of psychoanalysis. These volumes contain the author's pre-self psychology essays as well as those he wrote in order to continue to expand on his groundbreaking ideas, which he presented in The Analysis of the Self; the Restoration of the Self; and in How Does Analysis Cure? These volumes of The Search for the Self permit the reader to understand not only the above three basic texts of psychoanalytic self psychology more profoundly, but also to appreciate the author's sustained openness to further changes - to dare to present his self psychology as in continued flux, influenced by newly emerging empirical data of actual clinical practice. The current re-issue of the four volumes of The Search for the Self would assure that the younger generation of psychoanalysts would be exposed to a clinical theory that could contribute greatly to solving the therapeutic dilemmas facing psychoanalysis today'.  This is Volume three.

1 Introspection and Empathy:

Further Thoughts About Their Role in Psychoanalysis (1968)

DOI: 10.4324/9780429483110-2

A path leads from identification by way of imitation to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards another mental life.

(Freud, 1921, p. 110)

This paper, as Kohut explicitly indicates, was written in its present form as a first draft during the summer of 1968, in response to the Presidential Address to the American Psychoanalytic Association on May 12, 1968, by Charles Brenner, but remained unpublished. It survived as an “uncompleted” manuscript in that Kohut dictated a first draft of it—as was his usual custom—which was then transcribed triple-spaced, so that he could add to, delete from, and revise the text, (This sequence would ordinarily be repeated until he felt satisfied that the paper was ready for publication.) The present paper survived with just one revision retyped. Thus this second version was no longer further refined—not even proofread—hence it is not considered here as “completed” with Kohut’s usual care.

Kohut made it clear that he undertook the writing of this paper reluctantly, since he never liked to engage in polemics. Phis may be one reason why he abandoned it. Another one may well have been that the topic was constantly in the forefront of his attention, and he expected to continue to write about it more in connection with the emerging new clinical data and his new conceptualizations—which, in fact, he did—rather than merely rework it in relation to criticisms of his earlier formulations. This paper also demonstrates, however, that Kohut was always affected by his critics and ultimately responded to them—directly or indirectly, but mainly nonpolemically—through the systematic continuation of his clinical and theoretical work.

[Freud] discovered that it is just as possible to obtain new knowledge through the scientific ordering of the data of introspection as it is through the utilization of the data of external perception derived from observation and experiment . . . by simply viewing the introspected material from a new vantage point Freud created a system of psychology; this system contains [not only ascertained facts but also] a number of hypotheses; but the same situation prevails also in the natural sciences . . . thanks to psychoanalysis we now possess the systematic knowledge concerning a series of data which had been neglected by the natural sciences—[analysis] demonstrates to us the influence of internal forces, which can only be discovered through introspection.

(Ferenczi, 1928a, p. 3)

My remarks constitute an addendum to a paper, “Introspection and Empathy,” originally presented more than ten years ago (Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association, Paris, 1957 and at the Twentieth Anniversary Meeting, Institute for Psychoanalysis, Chicago, Nov, 16, 1957, subsequently published in 1959), although I do not like the back and forth of polemics in science and believe that scientific findings and opinions should with rare exceptions be presented on their own merit without the need to engage in polemics with opponents—always a fruitless enterprise. At any rate, has anyone ever persuaded an opponent that he was wrong? I must admit that these pages would not have seen the light of day had I not encountered a quite surprising reaction to my essay. Charles Brenner (1968) writes as follows:

Indeed, even among psychoanalysts, the traditional stricture against the study of such subjective phenomena as those with which psychoanalysts deal has inclined some (Kohut, 1959) to the opinion that there is a basic distinction to be made between psychoanalysis and other natural sciences precisely because introspection plays a role in the former and not in the latter.

I am not convinced of the correctness of this assertion. There is a vitally important difference between the approach of a psychoanalyst to these data on the one hand, and of an introspective psychologist or philosopher on the other. The latter is concerned with his own thoughts and feelings, the former is concerned with the thoughts and feelings of another, who reports them to him.

I was surprised by the implication of these statements that I had made the erroneously conceived assertion that there is a basic distinction to be made between analysis and other natural sciences because analysis employs introspection and that, apparently, this error is due to a neglect of the difference between the approach of the analyst and the approach of the introspective psychologist or philosopher.

There are differences, of course, and the methodology of a science defines to some extent the limits of the field that can be investigated and the nature of the data that are obtained. It is thus obvious that an examination of a tissue by biochemical means will lead to data that are basically different from those obtained with the aid of a microscope. If we wish to stress differences, we may say that biochemistry is basically different from histology; if we wish to stress similarities, we will point to the integration of the results achieved by both methods, etc.—it all depends on the context in which the two approaches are compared. I made indeed such comparisons between psychoanalysis (which uses empathy as an essential constituent in the data-gathering step of its investigation) and other approaches (e.g., the biological or sociological approach) which either do not use empathy at all or do not use it to the same extent as does analysis. Thus I introduced the comparison between the concept of dependence in psychoanalysis with the same concept as used by biologists and sociologists with the following statement: “Some concepts used by psychoanalysts are not abstractions founded on introspective observation or empathic introspection but are derived from data obtained through other methods of observation. Such concepts must be compared with the theoretical abstractions based on psychoanalytic observations; they are, however, not identical with them.”

In general, I tried as best I could to avoid black or white statements in my essay and attempted to demonstrate the relativity of such methodological distinctions, pointing in this context in particular to the continuum of lessening use of empathy (“vicarious introspection”) as the observed becomes more and more dissimilar to the observer. There is therefore a high degree of empathy when we observe people of our own culture, lesser empathy with people from a different background, still less with animals, hardly existing with plants, and nonexisting with inanimate objects. The same holds true when we try to grasp archaic mental states. Here, too, I said that the reliability of empathy declines the more dissimilar the observed is from the observer; and our ability to formulate the archaic mental processes in terms that are near to introspection and to empathically reconstructed experiences becomes thus more and more uncertain, a fact which leads us properly to formulate our statements concerning these early states in different terms.

There is no question, however, about the existence of a basic difference between the approach of a psychoanalyst to the data of introspection and empathy and that of an introspectionist, psychologist, or philosopher to the data of his introspective observation. As I stressed in my 1959 essay:

Introspection and empathy play thus a role in all psychological understanding; Breuer and Freud, however, were par excellence pioneers in the scientific use of introspection and empathy. The emphasis on the specific refinements of introspection (i.e., free association and analysis of resistances); the epoch-making discovery of a hitherto unknown kind of inner experience that emerges only with the aid of these specific techniques of introspection (i.e., the discovery of the unconscious); and the scope of new understanding of normal and abnormal psychological phenomena has tended to obscure the fact that the first step was the introduction of the consistent use of introspection and empathy as the observational tools of a new science. Free association and resistance analysis, the principal techniques of psychoanalysis, have freed introspective observations from previously unrecognized distortions (rationalizations). There is, thus, no question that the introduction of free association and resistance analysis (with the resulting acknowledgment of the distorting influences of an active unconscious) specifically determines the value of psychoanalytic observation. The recognition of this value does, however, not contradict the recognition that free association and resistance analysis are yet to be considered as auxiliary instruments, employed in the service of the introspective and empathic method of observation [p. 211].

The essential difference between analysis and introspectionism is not that the analyst takes a more detached observational stance supported by empathy, while in introspectionalism the observer gives himself wholly over to the introspective activity. The introspectionalist does not necessarily have to be undisciplined, and the analyst may well give himself over temporarily to a full empathic absorption in the mental state of his analysand without yet losing the capacity to return to a subsequent cool scrutiny of the experience which he had thus allowed to resonate in him. The essential difference lies not in the empathic or introspective step of data collection but in the subsequent working over of the material. All sciences that have gone beyond the most rudimentary state of primary data collection have to formulate the general statements about their subject matter in terms that are at a distance from the experienced observation—and psychoanalysis with its specific theory (metapsychology) is no exception: the data which it collects with the aid of empathic observations are only a first step; the scientific result is attained by an ordering of the data with the aid of a specific conceptual framework and a specific system of symbolic notations which are relevant to the nature of the empathically perceived subject matter. In contrast to the scientific psychoanalyst, the thinking of the pure introspectionist remains either too near to the direct data of observation (it remains in essence descriptive) or—les extremes se touchent—it makes a vast jump from the directly observed experience to the highest levels of (e.g., philosophical) generalization. Analysis, too, formulates, of course, broad theorems that lie at a great distance from the directly observed experience, but these most general statements are linked to the data of direct observation by intermediary sets of theories (see Waelder, 1962). In summary then: in psychoanalysis empathic observation is an instrument in the service of an empirical science; in pure introspectionism it is not.

The essential intent of my 1959 paper was, therefore, not to assert, as Brenner implies, that there is no difference between psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and the introspectionism of introspective psychology and introspective philosophy, on the other; and not, as Brenner claims, to assert “that there is a basic distinction to be made between psychoanalysis and other natural sciences.” On the contrary, I wanted to demonstrate that the neglect of the proper use of empathy and the disavowal of the fact that it is being used (when indeed it is used because it must be used) leads to analysis becoming less scientific; i.e., it leads not only to a general coarsening of our scientific formulations but also to specific “inaccuracies, omissions, and errors” (Kohut, 1959, p. 212).

This is not the place to demonstrate in detail the specific defects which come about when the role of introspection and empathy in the data-collecting step of psychoanalysis is disregarded. The substance of the 1959 essay was indeed concerned with the task of furnishing these details and the reader is referred to this paper. In a later paper I supplied a similar set of interrelated examples (Kohut, 1966) concerning the limits of the self and compared the difference between the psychoanalytic concept of object love with the sociopsychological concept of object relations. By showing, in other words, the depth of meaning that accrues to us when we, as we do as psychoanalysts, rely confidently on introspection and empathy as the instruments with which we collect our primary data, I demonstrated, I believe, by inescapable implication, the great coarsening of meaning and the errors in judgment that arose when depthpsychological statements concerning these experiences are made without the unashamedly acknowledged reliance of the observer on empathy when he scrutinizes the psychic life of man (1966, p. 429).

Again, I wish to avoid extreme statements, and I do not claim that in our science all new insights must necessarily be achieved with the aid of, or even on the basis of, empathic observation. Once a science has accumulated a vast set of data and has derived appropriate theoretical concepts and formulations from them, the mere manipulation of the theories and concepts themselves, bypassing all the activities that are engaged in primary observation (i.e., in our case, the use of empathy and introspection) will sometimes yield substantial results.

The formulation, for example, that depression rests on—or, as I would say, that some of the symptoms of a certain group of depressions are fueled by—the pressure of unexpressed and, therefore, inward-directed aggression may conceivably have been achieved by thought experiment, i.e, via the appropriate manipulation of concepts and that it was not derived more directly (i.e., as a next step) from the data of empathic observation. I am suggesting the possibility, in other words, that Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” theories were originally not formulated on (1) the empathic observation of the presence of marginal rage, and (2) on the empathic observation of this rage as it shifted its aim from the object to the self. Yet, as I must add immediately, while it is quite thinkable that Freud arrived at this hypothesis about the nature of depression while outside the clinical setting, i.e., while not actively engaged in the use of empathy, the relevant thought experimentation itself he is likely to have undertaken, included an imagined subject toward which the thought experiment extended his empathy. Analytic theory, I should like to add, even experience-distant theory should, while appropriately general and abstract, still never become mechanistic. And many of the formulations of traditional psychoanalytic metapsychology (as I tried to demonstrate in my 1959 essay) are indeed in full harmony with the specific data-collecting attitude (empathy) of the analytic investigator. I am convinced of the fact that, without arriving at any clear reformulation of the traditionally conceived forces (drives) that fuel an engine (the structures of a mental apparatus) to perform its functions (psychic mechanisms), many clinicians do indeed take the aforementioned step and do not burden their analysands with mechanistic interpretations. But I cannot express myself with the same (at least preponderantly confident) manner on the issues with regard to modern depth-psychological investigators who, more and more, it seems to me, are confusing the distorted formulations of traditional theory with psychic reality and are thus unable to discover anything new. I myself hope some day to turn to the considerable task of a systematic reformulation of theory (to take that “one step” that I spoke of above). But for the present I will retain the traditional framework and during the forthcoming years undertake to present some clinical discoveries in a systematic way, trusting my ability (and the analogous ability of my professional colleagues) to make this step in approximation in order to ensure that not only my clinical findings but also my experience-near clinical formulations (which establish the interrelationship and significance of the new data) remain intrinsically compatible with the fact that they belong into the field of inner experience that is accessible to us only via introspection and empathy. There cannot be any doubt that, up to now at least, the deepest insights into human nature in health and disease have been derived more or less directly via the scrutiny of primary data collection via empathy and introspection, and I believe that, at least in the foreseeable future, no other road is open to the depth psychologist who wishes to penetrate further into the as yet unknown and unexplored regions of the human mind. Nothing, so far, as I at least hold firmly to be true, has been discovered in our field—and I should stress that I am using the term “discovered” advisedly—that was not derived more or less directly from depth-psychological observation, i.e., that was not derived from data obtained via empathy and introspection.¹ And, however mechanistic and old-fashioned traditional metapsychology may be, however great even its distorting influence on our perception, it is still in harmony with the depth psychologist’s basic observational stance—his introspective-empathic outlook. It was created, after all, in an atmosphere of empathy, i.e., Freud’s clinical work and introspection, Freud’s self-analysis, or, to say the least, it is compatible with it. My noninclusion here of the “adaptive point of view” is not prompted by any considerations concerning the time of its introduction (which one might call neoclassical rather than classical) but by the realization that it does indeed not belong into the traditional introspective-empathic framework of analysis and, like Erikson’s (1950) concept of “identity,” tries to take up an ambiguous position in a never-never land at the borders between depth psychology and social psychology. Thus I believe that for the time being, i.e., until a new metapsychology can be devised which, whatever its improvements (of shedding its mechanistic formulations and freeing itself front the other features that restrict the depth psychologist’s vision and even distort his perception), will, like traditional metapsychology, be derived from and remain in harmony with the psychoanalyst’s basic observational stance, we should retain the old theories and continue to pour our new wine into the old bottles. The task of transferring them later into a new set of theoretical containers should not be all too difficult. Like Anna Freud (see her Sigmund Freud Lecture in New York, 1968), therefore, I am strongly in favor of not disregarding our theoretical framework, i.e., in particular not to shift our primary focus from the individual and his motivations to the tensions that exist between individuals, between the individual and society, and the like. No one could deny the importance of sociocultural psychology and the need to investigate this field that demands research with observational and conceptual-theoretical tools adapted to this field. But the depth psychologist first has his own contribution to make, and the still open roads into this largely unexplored field allow us to anticipate discoveries that stagger the imagination.

1. When I said above that I am using the term “discovered” advisedly, I had among other considerations particularly in mind that I was excluding here two major contributions to our field—the first one much maligned, the second one, somewhat unthinkingly, as I would judge, widely accepted—from the list of major discoveries in depth psychology, even though I myself have the greatest admiration and respect for each of them. But I cannot assign them to the class of discoveries because, as far as I can imagine, they were not derived more or less directly from primary data but by methods that transcended the scope of empathic observations—the first on the one end of the spectrum, the second on the other. Specifically, then, I am excluding here Freud’s (1920) biological theories about Eros and Thanatos which I take to be the result of biological philosophizing (analogous to Haeckel’s similar undertakings) and Hartmann’s (1939a) introduction of an adaptational point of view which I take to be the result of sociopsychological reasoning. The first is, as far as I can judge, and despite Ferenczi’s attempt to show otherwise, not well grounded in the clinical field. The second, although it may have clinical usefulness and certainty relevant to clinical data is not a depth-psychological discovery, even as theory, because unlike the other “points of view” of metapsychology, it refers more to what goes on between people rather than in the process active in the psyche itself.

The choice of the basic theoretical viewpoint (or of the multiplicity of viewpoints) which the psychological observer makes, depends, I am convinced, not only on the dispassionate assessment of the merit of the particular position that he has chosen, but on his emotional commitment...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Unfolding and Completion of Heinz Kohut’s Paradigm of Psychoanalysis
• 1. Introspection and Empathy: Further Thoughts About Their Role in Psychoanalysis (1968)
• 2. On Leadership (1969-70)
• 3. On Courage (early 1970s)
• 4. From the Analysis of Mr. R. (early 1970s)
• 5. Originality and Repetition in Science (1975)
• 6. Reflections on the Occasion of Jean Piaget’s Eightieth Birthday (1976)
• 7. Self Psychology and the Sciences of Man (1978)
• 8. Reflections on Advances in Self Psychology (1978 [1980])
• 9. The Disorders of the Self and Their Treatment: An Outline (Kohut and Wolf, 1978)
• 10. Introductory Remarks to the Panel on “Self Psychology and the Sciences of Man” (1978)