Self psychology

Self psychology, a modern psychoanalytic theory and its clinical applications, was conceived by Heinz Kohut in Chicago in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and is still developing as a contemporary form of psychoanalytic treatment. In self psychology, the effort is made to understand individuals from within their subjective experience via vicarious introspection, basing interpretations on the understanding of the self as the central agency of the human psyche. Essential to understanding self psychology are the concepts of empathy, selfobject, mirroring, idealising, alter ego/twinship and the tripolar self. Though self psychology also recognizes certain drives, conflicts, and complexes present in Freudian psychodynamic theory, these are understood within a different framework. Self psychology was seen as a major break from traditional psychoanalysis and is considered the beginnings of the relational approach to psychoanalysis.

Kohut came to psychoanalysis by way of neurology and psychiatry in the 1940s, but then 'embraced analysis with the fervor of a convert ... [and as] "Mr Psychoanalysis" ' took on an idealizing image of Freud and his theories. Subsequently, "in a burst of creativity that began in the mid-1960s ... Kohut found his voice and explored narcissism in new ways that led to what he ended up calling a 'psychology of the self'".

Kohut explained, in 1977, that in all he wrote on the psychology of the self, he purposely did not define the self. He explained his reasoning this way: "The self...is, like all reality...not knowable in its essence...We can describe the various cohesive forms in which the self appears, can demonstrate the several constituents that make up the self ... and explain their genesis and functions. We can do all that but we will still not know the essence of the self as differentiated from its manifestations.

Kohut maintained that parents' failures to empathize with their children and the responses of their children to these failures were 'at the root of almost all psychopathology.' For Kohut, the loss of the other and the other's self-object ("selfobject") function (see below) leaves the individual apathetic, lethargic, empty of the feeling of life, and without vitality – in short, depressed.

The infant moving from grandiose to cohesive self and beyond must go through the slow process of disillusionment with phantasies of omnipotence, mediated by the parents: 'This process of gradual and titrated disenchantment requires that the infant's caretakers be empathetically attuned to the infant's needs'.

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