Response to Commentaries by Coburn, Gardner and Teicholz on “The Emerging Paradigm of Relational Self Psychology: An Historical Perspective”

ABSTRACT

We express our deep appreciation to our three commentators, William Coburn, Jill Gardner, and Judy Teicholz, recognizing the value we gained by each of them reading our paper closely and respectfully, and responding accordingly. We begin with William Coburn, who saw our efforts as the latest move in the evolution of the complex system we call Self Psychology. We feel he appreciated our account of how Self Psychology has developed and changed both within Kohut’s lifetime and since his death, moving from a one-person to a two-person psychology, in part in response to interaction with infant research, Intersubjectivity theory, and other relational theories. We then move to Jill Gardner, who raises questions about just how differently we view the nature of the self and transference and asks if there are predetermined aspects of each that are not relationally co-created in the analysis. Finally, we turn to Judy Teicholz, for whom Kohut has always been a relational Self Psychologist. We feel this is an ahistorical view that fails to enter into the classical one-person psychology milieu in which Kohut was trained and initially worked, and obscures the significant changes in Self Psychology that emerged both in his lifetime and through the efforts of subsequent theorists. All in all, we are grateful for the time and effort all three of our commentators devoted to what we wrote.

KEYWORDS:

• Relational Self Psychology
• Self Psychology
• Kohut
• intersubjectivity
• selfobject

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barry Magid

Barry Magid, MD is member of the faculty of the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Study and Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and a past member of the Executive Board of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. (IARRP).

James Fosshage

James l. Fosshage Ph.D. is Founding President of the International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology (IAPSP) and co-Founder of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP) and Founding Faculty member of the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity.

Estelle Shane

Estelle Shane Ph.D. is a Training and Supervisory analyst at the New Center for Psychoanalysis and Founding member and Training and Supervisory analyst at the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She is a Founder and Board member of the International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology.(IAPSP).