Relational Self Psychology: Could There Be Any Other Kind? A Discussion of Magid, Fosshage & Shane’s Paper, The Emerging Paradigm of Relational Self Psychology: A Historical Perspective

ABSTRACT

In this paper I discuss Magid, Fosshage and Shane’s impressive overview of the contributions to Relational Self Psychology in the psychoanalytic literature, contributions they see as having emerged for the most part after Kohut’s death and therefore as having been carried out almost entirely by Kohut’s followers. But while the authors see Kohut’s work as having hewed closely to a one-person psychology, I use my discussion to highlight what I see as the two-person themes in Kohut’s own writings, suggesting that he may have been more relational in his thinking than initially meets the eye.

KEYWORDS:

• relational
• two-person
• intersubjectivity
• other
• self

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Judy Guss Teicholz

Judy Guss Teicholz, EdD, was on the Clinical Faculty in Psychiatry/Psychology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital from 1977 to 2000. She was a Faculty Member and Supervising Analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and a member of the guest faculty at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. She authored the book Kohut, Loewald, and the Postmoderns, co-edited the book Trauma, Repetition, and Affect Regulation, and has published several dozen journal articles from 1978 to the present, with several new papers to be published in 2021. She has served on the Editorial Board of the Psychoanalysis, Self and Context and has been an editorial reviewer for Psychoanalytic Dialogues.