Cushman and Kohut: Constructing Identities vs. Developing Selves in the Context of Modern American Life

ABSTRACT

In this paper I address Phillip Cushman’s critique of psychoanalytic psychotherapy as being both naïve about how socio/political forces generate persons in America and complicit in reproducing the deficient form of self generated in America—the “masterful, bounded, empty self,” a kind of self he finds particularly validated in the theories of self psychologists Winnicott and Kohut. I both show how these critiques are misguided and provide a different narrative for why psychodynamic therapy arose, one that sees it not as a pawn of socio/discursive forces, but as an important source of rebellion, one offering an alternative way of being human from the regnant forms dominating modern life. I further show how Kohut’s self psychology can help us negotiate the difficult problem of Otherness. In the end, I bring Cushman and Kohut together by seeing Cushman’s work as exploring how identities are constructed, while Kohut is articulating a theory of how selves are developed. The crucial conceptual point is to differentiate ego identities from nuclear selves and understand their psychological interdependence.

KEYWORDS:

• Cushman
• Kohut
• developing selves vs. constructing identities
• modern American life
• social constructivism

Notes

¹ Cushman denied being a social constructivist at the Vancouver Conference, but insofar as he also denied the existence of a universal human nature or universal psychological needs, I must continue to view him as someone for whom human beings are largely constructed according to the values and codes of their societies.

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Notes on contributors

John H. Riker

John H. Riker, Ph.D., has been a professor of philosophy for over fifty years at Colorado College where he has won numerous awards for teaching, advising, and working with diversity.  He has published four books intersecting psychoanalysis and philosophy, the most recent being Exploring the Life of the Soul.