Self Psychology in a Pluralistic World: A Position Paper

ABSTRACT

In this article the author outlines his understanding of self-psychology as an independent psychoanalytic treatment paradigm created by the late Heinz Kohut and initially geared toward the psychoanalytic treatment of narcissistic disorders. Since then, self-psychology theory and practice have been enriched by new theoretical and clinical considerations and have been introduced into other forms of psychotherapy, counseling, and education, for example. One important conceptual contribution to developmental theory was Heinz Kohut’s differentiation of separate narcissistic and “object love” related developmental tasks. Today, new paradigms as i.e. relational analysis stress the value of human relationships and of the value of mutual recognition. This warrants a revisiting of the clinical value of the self-psychological understanding of narcissism. According to the author it lies in the nature of unattended narcissistic needs that when unattended they take primacy over relational aspects and demand adequate attention in order to open up the space for mutuality, reciprocity et cetera.

KEYWORDS:

• Self psychology
• narcissism
• selfobject needs
• object love
• intersubjectivity
• reciprocity
• mutuality
• recognition
• representations of self
• representations of self with other
• transference

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ An exquisite and thorough review of the development of Heinz Kohut’s writings was presented by the honorable late Paul Ornstein under the title‚ “The search for the self. Selected writings by Heinz Kohut”, 4 volumes; first printed by the International Universities Press, Madison. CT., recently reprinted by Karnac Books, London.

² In describing my position I shall make the effort to use a language which is as close to our every day language as possible in order to make it easier to compare the theoretical considerations with our own experience.

³ Why something psychological? Because I had a vague idea that pancreatitis may be caused by alcohol use and I did assume that if he had been a happy man, he would have been able to abstain from drinking alcohol in order to overcome his physical illness. But he had to be readmitted!

⁴ In the course of medical school I learned that that is not really how a general practitioner usually sees his patients. But you know what? This is still how I consider my task to this very day. It does not include a Biedermeier table and only very rarely is there a cup of tea involved, though it actually was last week.

⁵ An analysand put it into words very poignantly: “When you tell me why you understand me in a certain way, then it is about YOU and not about me. I know that you have reasons to see things one way or the other; and I know that understanding one another has its limits, but, please, do not tell me how YOU see ME. Because then I have the feeling it is not about me, it is about you.”

⁶ At least not in the sense of a ‘natural science‘. And maybe it is not a ‘human science‘, like i.e. philosophy, either, but a mode of its own: a mode of inquiry which deals not with objective but with subjective data. The question is, how systematic this approach is; so far, it seems rather non-systematic, and thus ‘non scientific‘, as Eric Kandel criticized in an interview with the German Hertie-Stiftung 2011: www.dasgehirn.info/entdecken/meilensteine/video-eric-kandel-im-interview

⁷ The explicit and fervent French Freud critic Michel Onfray (2011) goes even further by pointing out that Freud did not extrapolate clinical findings from one of his patients to the others but took his individual experience as the blueprint for the human psyche altogether. An experience, in the case of the supposed Oedipus conflict, which was extensively coiffured by his biographers in order to fit the supposedly general psychological phenomena (chapter III: Oedipus – Eine Fata Morgana im Schlafwagen, pp. 122–132 (engl. [M.G]: Oedipus – a Fata Morgana in the pullman coach), in that coiffured way serving as the basis for the supposedly general presence of ‘oedipal’ strivings in the human being.

⁸ It would be fascinating to speculate how Freud would have explained, or ‘cognized‘ these clinical phenomena had he not been acquainted with Greek mythology which allowed him to ‘re-cognize‘ these phenomena in the patients of his time. In fact, it seems he had to bend Greek Mythology backwards. He turned Laius‘ conscious order that his son be killed – because Laius was afraid that otherwise his son Oedipus would one day want his throne – into an unconscious wish on his son’s part to kill his father, whom he did not know because he was only spared from the fate of being killed on his father’s demand because he was secretly raised by adoptive parents, never having been told. Freud thereby turned frank attempts at infanticide into patricide. What a rich soil for complex dynamics, intrapsychic, and interpersonal, let alone intersubjective! It seems Freud also bent the myth of Narcissus quite a bit: Narcissus turns down Echo’s demand that he love her and as a punishment is put by her under a spell so that he can only love himself but nobody else. “Since you rejected me, you shall not have anyone else” was the motto. Love me or you will die unhappy! Interestingly enough, until today, we often talk about narcissism As if it were self-imposed.

⁹ I refer here to the French philosopher Bruno Latour’s (2013) concept of separate and incompatible ‘modes of existence‘; a central notion within this concept is the claim that ‘facts‘ which seem plausible in one mode of existence, i.e. law, religion, science, economics cannot be transferred into another mode: what seems a given or ‘truth‘ in religion is not represented in any way in law or science – and the other way round.

¹⁰ Today, we speak of ‘affect regulation‘, Kohut referred to it as ‘tension regulation‘.

¹¹ See i.e. Teicholz (2009).

¹² It does not immediately qualify as scientific research what my mother told me – before the background of having studied philosophy, psychology, and sociology: having given birth to her own children she had the chance to go to the nursery room where up to 12 newborns were kept (at the time “rooming-in” was not yet practiced). Observing the different ways in which these 12 little creatures responded to their waking up or being woken up, their different ways of expressing their hunger, for example, she said: “You could clearly see, that these were not 12 empty screens upon which life had not yet inscribed its marks; these were obviously 12 distinct little personalities!”.

¹³ As a friend of mine, Christian Strub, at the time professor of philosophy, once told me about the context of this famous declaration.

¹⁴ In a thought provoking and indeed provocative paper Stolorow and Atwood (2012) claim that there “is no” self but that we can merely concede an “experiencing of selfhood”, the fate of which depends on contextual factors. What Heinz Kohut had in mind, however – as far as I understand his construct – is not merely that the mode/degree/quality of the experience of selfhood may change in an admittedly context dependent manner but that the overall psychological functioning does, too. These changes in the overall psychological functioning go beyond the waxing and waning of the degree and quality of the experience of selfhood, it seems, and cannot be explained by the concepts of “defense”, “regression”, or unstable “ego functions”, for example. It would obviously have been for Heinz Kohut to say if indeed the term (and Stolorow’s understanding of the nature of) the experiencing of selfhood actually captures what he himself tried to capture in his notion of the self. My understanding of Stolorow’s and Atwood’s notion of the context dependant changes in the experiencing of self hood appears not fully congruent with the changes in mental functioning described by Kohut as the sign of a momentary ‘fragmentation of the self‘, as I understand it.

¹⁵ The fact that this was done in relation to what was regarded as the patient’s best interest and in the best interest of the maintenance of the treatment process led to the differentiation of the responses to ‘positive‘ versus ‘negative‘ transferences.

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Martin Gossmann

Martin Gossmann, M.D., grew up in postwar West Germany, where he received his medical education and his training in neurology and neuroradiology; he completed his training in psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati, where he studied psychoanalytic psychotherapy with Anna and Paul Ornstein at their International Center for the Study of Self Psychology. Since his return to Germany, he has been teaching psychotherapy at various training institutes and at the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin with special focus on the therapeutic process.