Nuclearity

ABSTRACT

This article revisits Kohut’s concept of the nuclear self, a concept oft criticized as a reification, a relic of a bygone era that idealizes separateness and autonomy. In an alternative view, I interpret Kohut’s nuclear self not as a thing one carries along in one’s mind but as a story gathering shape over time through our interactions with others, closer to the Greek idea of fate than to Freud’s psychic apparatus. We are each of us heading through a series of transformations toward a surprising way of being that in the end feels preordained. A primary object of psychoanalysis is to track the sources and progress of this nuclear self. I coin the word “nuclearity” in contrast to Mitchell’s “relationality” and Freud’s “reality.” All three words describe a condition of the world as well as a value system, a way of thinking that shows us what we are looking for. This circularity is not a problem so long as we understand that the views we see from our viewpoints are constrained as though by literary genre. We can be truthful within a historical genre, but we cannot arrive at a final viewpoint from which to see everything. The genre or viewpoint of nuclearity is one in which the patient’s ever-evolving sense of coming into being organizes the psychoanalytic encounter.

KEYWORDS:

• Narrative
• nuclear self
• story
• development
• Kohut
• empathy

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Goldin

Daniel Goldin, Psy.D., is a training and supervising psychoanalyst practicing in South Pasadena, California. He serves as an associate editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry and as an associate editor of Psychoanalysis, Self and Context. He has written articles for Psychoanalytic Dialogues, The International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, and Psychoanalytic Inquiry. He is on the faculty of Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles.