On becoming a thou: Discussion of Steven Stern’s “Breathing together: Needed relationships and complex selfobjects” and Daniel Goldin’s “Empathy on a continuum”

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Notes

¹ This idea is particularly evocative of Kohut’s (1984, pp. 93–94) statement: “If there is one lesson that I have learned during my life as an analyst, it is the lesson that what my patients tell me is likely to be true—that many times when I believed that I was right and my patients were wrong, it turned out, though often only after a prolonged search, that my rightness was superficial whereas their rightness was profound”.

² Ornstein said this on the final panel of the Twentieth Annual International Conference on the Psychology of the Self in 1997.

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Amanda Kottler

Amanda Kottler MA, is a clinical psychologist practicing as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in Cape Town, South Africa. She is a founding and faculty member of the Cape Town Psychoanalytic Self Psychology Group and an Emeritus Council Member of the International Association of Self Psychology. She lectures at the University of Cape Town. Her academic interests are in the areas of similarities and difference and how they intersect with feeling at home and belonging – feeling human among other human beings. She has coedited New Developments in Self Psychology Practice with Peter Buirski (Jason Aronson, 2007) and Culture, Power and Difference: Discourse Analysis in South Africa with Ann Levett, Erica Burman, and Ian Parker (Zed Books, 1997). She is a co-author with Koichi Togashi of Kohut’s Twinship across Cultures: The Psychology of Being Human (Routledge, 2015).