Heinz Kohut

Heinz Kohut was an Austrian-born psychoanalyst who trained in Vienna and built his career in Chicago, where he gradually developed a new school of thought called self psychology. Starting from within classical Freudian analysis, he found that a growing number of patients — those suffering not from internal conflicts but from a fragile or poorly formed sense of self — could not be adequately helped by existing theory. His answer was to shift the central question of psychoanalysis from the management of unconscious drives to the formation and maintenance of a coherent self. He argued that every person needs others to function as psychological supports — which he called selfobjects — and that failures of this support in childhood produce the distinctive suffering of the modern era: inner emptiness, fragmentation, and the nameless dread of ceasing to exist as a person.

The Clinical Problem: Narcissistic Disorders

Kohut began from a clinical observation that classical theory could not comfortably contain. The patients who increasingly filled psychoanalytic consulting rooms in the postwar decades did not fit the model Freud had built to explain hysteria and obsessional neurosis. Those conditions arose, in Freud’s framework, from conflicts between psychic structures that were themselves intact — the id pressing for satisfaction, the ego and superego resisting. Kohut identified something structurally different: a second category of disorder in which the central structures of the personality were not in conflict but were themselves defective or incompletely formed.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

He pressed this distinction at the level of clinical detail. Two kinds of pathological formation could cover a defect in the self. A defensive structure merely concealed the wound; a compensatory structure took a different path around it, rehabilitating the self by strengthening the opposite pole of its architecture from the one that had failed to develop.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) This meant that genuine improvement in such patients did not look like conflict resolution — the patient becoming more conscious, more free from repression. It looked like structural building: the self becoming more solid, more capable of sustaining itself without external supports.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) The clinical test of termination in narcissistic disorders was not whether the patient had arrived at insight but whether their structural gains were now functionally reliable.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

The inadequacy of existing theory was also visible in the etiology of these conditions. Kohut situated this inadequacy historically: Freud’s theoretical framework had been shaped by the scientific temper of the nineteenth century, which positioned the observer as separate from the observed and generated a psychology of forces and mechanisms best suited to explaining the structural neuroses — hysteria above all — that had dominated the consulting room at the turn of the century.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) Classical analysis explained oral-clinging behavior and dependency as drive regressions — the patient retreating from oedipal conflict to an infantile fixation. Kohut argued that most such presentations were something else entirely: the expression of archaic self-object needs in a self that had never developed the structure to sustain itself.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) The drive was not primary; it was a fragment that appeared when the larger psychological configuration had broken apart. When a child’s forming self went unresponded to, it fell back on the stimulation of erogenous zones for reassurance that it was alive — and from this secondary retreat came what looked like drive fixation.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

He pressed this reframing into clinical territory that seemed well settled. The anal character’s penuriousness had always been explained by drive fixation — the child’s early experiences around feces had left an enduring stamp on the libidinal economy. Kohut accepted this as a partial account but argued that the decisive factor was different: the mother’s response to the child’s fecal gift also registered, at the self level, as acceptance or rejection of the child as a center of creative initiative, and it was this dimension — the forming self seeking confirmation from the mirroring self-object — that explained the deepest features of the character.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) The same argument applied to cases that had been misread as spoiling. In the case Kohut called Mr. U., the mother and grandmother appeared fully gratifying, responsive to every drive demand — yet beneath the apparent richness was a depleted, depressed sector. The self-objects had been gratifying the child’s drives for their own purposes while simultaneously disregarding the child’s maturing self, which needed confirming-admiring responses and approval; the fetish that resulted was not the product of over-gratification but of the specific traumatic absence of empathy for the child’s healthy grandiosity and exhibitionism.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

Related clinical material showed that even the child’s feeding experience was not primarily about food. What the child asserted from the beginning was the need for a food-giving self-object — empathically modulated food-giving rather than food itself. When that need remained traumatically unmet, the broader psychological configuration disintegrated and the child retreated to oral stimulation as a fragment of what had been a larger experiential unit; this retreat formed the crystallization point for later addiction.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

He made this argument vivid through a case he called Mr. M., whose primary self-defect originated in his mother’s failure to mirror the healthy grandiosity of a young child finding its own distinctness. A second defect — in the compensatory structures that might have made up for this — arose from his father’s inability to allow himself to be idealized by his son. Both poles of the nuclear self were damaged, and the analysis had to address both.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

The clinical portrait of termination in such cases included characteristic phenomena Kohut had learned to recognize. In analyses where the work had centered on rehabilitating compensatory structures rather than filling the primary defect, the terminal phase produced what looked, temporarily, like a collapse of all gains: patients re-externalized the compensatory structures in the form of gross acting out, as if the work of structure-building had been sham.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) A related phenomenon appeared in analyses that had engaged very early, preverbal damage: the deepest layer of such primordial trauma could not be recovered through verbalized memory and expressed no organized somatic symptom. Its presence was attested only by the patient’s dread that further analysis would become addictive — a fear of a regressive voyage from which there might be no return.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) Against both phenomena Kohut set a clinical principle: the analyst should, as a rule, trust a patient’s wish to terminate when it arose after sustained work and when the analyst could articulate the dynamic-structural situation underlying that wish; in certain circumstances the analysand’s capacity to assess their own psychological state was more accurate than the analyst’s.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

The broader theoretical claim was that the child did not enter the world as a drive-seeking organism embedded in an environment that rewarded or frustrated it. The child was born into an empathic-responsive human milieu as necessarily as into oxygen; its nascent self expected empathic responsiveness the way the respiratory apparatus expected air.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) Self pathology arose not primarily from drive deprivation but from empathy failure — the self-object’s distorted or absent response to the child’s psychological need, especially the subtle forms of distortion caused by the self-object’s own narcissistic disturbance.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

The Nuclear Self and Selfobjects

The organizing concept of Kohut’s system is the self — not the ego of classical theory, which was one agency among several in a mental apparatus, but the self as the center of psychological experience. The theoretical move required recognizing that drives did not constitute the primary experiential units of early psychological life. Exhibitionism, voyeurism, and related drive configurations were disintegration products — fragments that appeared when the self went unsupported, when the child’s self-assertive presence was not met by the mirroring self-object and the healthy original exhibitionism gave way to isolated, sexualized preoccupations with single symbols of greatness.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) The primary psychological configurations were the broad self-object constellations, and drives emerged from their failure. During early development, he proposed, some mental contents came to be experienced as belonging to the self and others were assigned to the world outside; this selective process established the nuclear self — the foundation of a person’s sense of being an independent center of initiative and perception, continuous across time, integrated with one’s most central ambitions and ideals, with body and mind experienced as a unit.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

The selfobject is the concept that makes this developmental story precise. A selfobject is not exactly a person; it is a person as experienced — functions performed by another person that the self cannot yet perform for itself. The child’s self coheres around the empathic responses of those it depends on, and those responses temporarily substitute for internal structure. Three types of selfobject relationship recur as central across Kohut’s work. Mirroring refers to the selfobject’s confirming, admiring response to the child’s grandiosity and exhibitionism — the mother’s beam of pleasure that validates the child’s “Look at me.” Idealization refers to the child’s need to look up to and merge with an idealized figure, absorbing its calm and power. Twinship (or alter-ego) refers to the need to experience the selfobject as fundamentally like oneself — a companion in shared humanity.

The nuclear self is bipolar: nuclear ambitions form one pole, consolidated through grandiose-exhibitionistic fantasies mainly in the second to fourth year and derived predominantly from the maternal self-object.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) Nuclear idealized goal structures form the second pole, established mainly in the fourth to sixth year.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

The mechanism by which selfobject relationships translated into permanent psychological structure was transmuting internalization. This was not identification in the classical sense. It required not optimal empathy but optimal failures of empathy — brief, manageable disruptions in the selfobject relationship that prompted the psyche to build its own internal version of what the selfobject had been providing. It was not the interpretation that cured the patient; it was this repeated process of small empathic failures followed by re-establishment, which gradually deposited new psychic structure.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) Empathy failure from the self-object was thus the mechanism of both pathology (when massive or distorted) and cure (when optimal and manageable).(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

The Bipolar Self

Kohut’s account of the self’s architecture is most fully stated in The Restoration of the Self (1977). The nuclear self is bipolar: one pole consists of nuclear ambitions — the basic strivings that drive a person forward; the other pole consists of nuclear idealized goals — the values and ideals that draw a person toward something worth pursuing. Between these poles runs what Kohut called the tension arc: the flow of actual psychological activity, the basic pursuits and engagements, toward which a person is driven by their ambitions and led by their ideals, mediated by the talents and skills available.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

This architecture gave Kohut a structural account of a person’s sense of continuity and of meaning. A person with a firmly established nuclear self experienced their life as coherent across time — not merely because they could remember the past and project themselves into the future (what he called the “historical stance”), but because the deeper pull of ambitions and ideals created an abiding sense of having a direction.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) Marcel Proust’s life illustrated both the power and the limits of a compensatory strategy: his creative effort held together a fragmented self for many years after the loss of his parental self-objects, but the novel also carried evidence of persisting fragmentation. Only a firmly cohesive nuclear self, Kohut concluded, would provide the deep conviction of enduring identity.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

The child had two developmental chances. Failure of both — failure of the mirroring self-object and failure of the idealizing self-object — was what produced self pathology of genuinely disabling degree.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) Kohut classified these pathologies in terms of their structural depth: psychoses and borderline states, in which the self had permanently broken apart or seriously distorted, were not analyzable through the selfobject transferences; narcissistic personality disorders and narcissistic behavior disorders, in which the self was temporarily or partially damaged but remained accessible, were in principle analyzable.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) The distinction between personality and behavior disorders was not dynamic but structural — behavior disorders reflected more primitive demands, usually because both poles had failed, leaving no compensatory structure to work with.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

The vertical and horizontal splits were the clinical means by which these structures could be dissected in analysis. Mr. X.’s case required first dismantling a vertical split — a sector of his personality still operating through an unbroken merger with his mother’s grandiosity — and then analyzing a horizontal split, in which his repressed nuclear self, structured around paternal ideals, had gone completely underground and had no communication with his functioning surface personality.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

Tragic Man and Guilty Man

One of the most consequential moves in Kohut’s theoretical architecture was a distinction about what kind of creature human psychology was ultimately trying to account for. Classical psychoanalysis had been built around Guilty Man — the person tormented by conflicting wishes, caught between desire and prohibition, between what the id demanded and what the ego and superego allowed. The central drama was internal conflict; the great anxiety was castration; the relevant cure was insight through which the ego could adjudicate between competing internal forces.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

Kohut proposed that this was only half the picture, and not the more urgent half for the contemporary world. Tragic Man was the other pole: not the person torn by conflict but the person who could not find or hold together a coherent self, who could not live out the innermost design that their nature had set for them. The great anxiety for Tragic Man was not castration but disintegration — the fragmenting of the self into pieces that could no longer be experienced as a continuous person.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) The great failure was not moral transgression but the failure to be oneself — to have allowed the tension arc from ambitions to ideals to run its course through the available life.

The structural summary of this contrast reconfigured the fundamental concepts. The id and the inhibiting superego were constituents of the mental apparatus of Guilty Man; nuclear ambitions and ideals were the poles of the self of Tragic Man. The conflictual Oedipus complex was the genetic focus of Guilty Man’s development; its nonconflictual aspects were a step in the development of Tragic Man. Between the two poles of the self stretched the tension arc that formed the center of Tragic Man’s pursuits.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

Kohut was specific about when this failure became visible. He placed the decisive psychological reckoning not at adolescence or at the resolution of the oedipus complex but in late middle age, when a person nearing decline asked whether they had been true to their innermost design. The suicides of that period were not, in his view, expressions of a punitive superego; they were remedial acts against the unbearable mortification of recognizing that it was now too late to live as the self one had always been.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

The distinction between Tragic Man and Guilty Man did not require choosing one framework over the other. Kohut had stated this as a methodological principle early in his argument: in analogy to the complementarity principle of modern physics, depth-psychological explanation of mental life required two complementary approaches — a conflict psychology and a psychology of the self — neither replacing nor subordinating the other.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) He restated this commitment when giving the Tragic Man/Guilty Man contrast its most explicit formulation: the two frameworks addressed two different but real aspects of human psychology and were both necessary for a complete depth psychology.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) Drive theory and structural theory explained Guilty Man adequately; they failed to explain Tragic Man’s experience of trying to establish a cohesive self and live from it.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

Self psychology redefined what mental health meant.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) It was not only freedom from symptoms and inhibitions that interfered with loving and working in the Freudian sense; it was also the capacity of a firm self to avail itself of the talents and skills available to a person.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

Self Psychology and the Oedipus Complex

Kohut’s treatment of the Oedipus complex was deliberately measured. He was not claiming that Freud’s observations were wrong. He was questioning the adequacy of the theoretical framework into which those observations had been placed and, more pointedly, the universal applicability of that framework.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) The data of the Oedipus complex — the sexual and aggressive wishes, the rivalries and anxieties — were real; the question was what they meant and whether they were inevitable.

His clinical reinterpretation begins with a structural claim: the presence of a firm, cohesive self is a precondition for oedipal experience. Unless the child experiences itself as a delimited, continuous, independent center of initiative, it cannot experience the object-instinctual desires that lead to oedipal conflicts in the first place.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) This structural dependency also ran in the opposite direction: a child exposed to the mortification of a fragmenting self might retreat into a defensively held oedipal position rather than face that disintegration. Kohut named two corresponding clinical formations: pseudonarcissistic disorders, in which a patient retreated from oedipal conflict into a chronic narcissistic position, and pseudotransference neuroses, in which oedipal-seeming presentations masked an underlying self disorder. Both were the product of defensive maneuvers and required the analyst to look beneath the surface presentation.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) The Oedipus complex, in this reading, was not the foundation on which the self was built; it was a developmental step available only to a child whose self had already been adequately formed.

The clinical implication was unexpected. At the end of successful analyses focused entirely on narcissistic disorders and self-object transferences — sometimes after many years of work that had never touched oedipal material — brief quasi-oedipal constellations appeared spontaneously. Kohut interpreted these not as regressions uncovering repressed childhood material but as new developmental achievements, the fruits of a consolidation of the self that had never before been possible. They were accompanied by warmth and joy rather than the dread and conflict that Freudian theory expected.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

His most challenging clinical reinterpretation concerned apparently oedipal material that was actually self-object need in disguise. Miss V.’s wish to see her father’s penis was not primarily about penis envy; it expressed her need to extricate herself from a bizarre and emotionally shallow mother and to acquire, through her father, the psychological structures that would allow her to engage with the world with vitality rather than with paranoia and emptiness.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) The reframing did not dismiss the observation; it changed what the observation was evidence for.

He went further in a speculation that remains his most contested claim: the dramatic conflict-ridden Oedipus complex of classical analysis might itself be a pathological formation — not a universal maturational necessity but the result of empathy failures from narcissistically disturbed parents during the oedipal period.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) Normal oedipal parents, in his account, responded to the child’s erotic and aggressive stirrings with appropriate limit-setting but also with pride and joy in the child’s developmental progress, with responses that confirmed the child’s total self as well as managing its particular wishes.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) When parents could not offer this — because their own narcissistic disturbances made them react to the child’s oedipal stirrings with seduction, competition, or rejection rather than pride — the oedipal drama became the anxiety-ridden and conflict-saturated experience Freud had described.

Empathy as Scientific Method

Kohut’s epistemological claims were as carefully argued as his clinical ones. He insisted that empathy was not a therapeutic attitude — not warmth, not sympathy, not good intentions toward the patient. It was a mode of observation: the primary data-gathering instrument of depth psychology, which studied complex mental states rather than physical or biological processes.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

The logic was straightforward. Physics and biology studied the external world through sensory observation. Depth psychology studied the inner life of the observed through the observer’s capacity to participate imaginatively in another person’s experience — what Kohut called vicarious introspection. This made empathy not a supplement to rigorous observation but its analogue in the introspective domain.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) It was as basic an endowment as vision or hearing, and like those senses it could be trained, disciplined, and subjected to error-correction.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

He drew a sharp distinction between empathy and intuition. The aha-experience — the sudden surge of unquestioned certainty — was potentially an enemy of accurate observation, not its friend. Sustained trial empathy, which collected multiple interpretive possibilities before settling on one, was the safeguard against theoretical bias dressing itself up as clinical insight.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) He formalized two epistemological principles for psychoanalytic evidence. The Emperor’s-New-Clothes principle required the naive courage to observe without forcing data into a priori frameworks. The Rosetta-Stone principle stated that confidence in a new theoretical framework increased as more and more data cohered into meaningful patterns when viewed from its vantage point — the validity established not by a single definitive experiment but by cumulative coherence.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

This epistemological position carried a methodological corollary for how Kohut asked critics to engage with self psychology. The explanatory power of any new theoretical framework could only be gauged if the evaluator could temporarily suspend prior convictions and expose themselves to the new configurations for long enough to become genuinely familiar with them.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) This was not an invitation to credulity; it was an acknowledgment that theoretical frameworks shape what counts as data, and that the only honest test was prolonged trial from within the new vantage point. He acknowledged that occasionally an evaluator might be surprised to discover that a centrally located oedipal pathology had been concealed beneath what appeared at first to be a primary disturbance of the self — the reverse of the more common layering — and that clinical assessment had to remain open to both possibilities.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

Kohut supported these epistemological claims with clinical illustration drawn from a specific and revealing population: children raised in psychoanalytic households. Their parents had in general been neither cold nor rejecting; the pathogenic element was a different kind of empathy failure — the parents’ claim to know more about what their children thought, felt, and wished than the children themselves. This interpretive intrusion had interfered with the consolidation of the children’s developing selves, producing a walling-off, a secretiveness, a need to prevent penetration by parental insight in order to preserve whatever nuclear self had managed to form.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) From within the framework of self psychology, such resistance was not a therapeutic-alliance failure; it was a healthy force preserving a rudiment of nuclear self that had survived despite distorted parental empathy, and its reactivation in analysis represented the revival of an archaic conviction of self-greatness that had gone unresponded to in early life and thus had never been available for gradual modification and integration.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

The clinical demonstration most pointed for Kohut’s argument came from a patient he called Mr. W., who suffered self-fragmentation following separations from the analyst. The sequence of his disintegration followed a fixed order: first the self-object was absent, then the body-self began to fragment in the form of hypochondriacal preoccupations with pre-existing minor physical defects — which became the foci of attention when cohesion was threatened — and only then did the deterioration of ego functions follow (spatial disorientation, cognitive confusion).(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) This order was not accidental. Mr. W.’s hypochondriacal symptoms were not conversion symptoms expressing specific unconscious wish-content; they were expressions of the diminution of body-self cohesion in the absence of the mirroring self-object, the body as experiential unit beginning to dissolve.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) The case demonstrated that self-cohesion was logically prior to ego functioning: the self had to hold together first before the ego could operate.

Empathy also defined what psychoanalysis was, at the deepest level. Kohut argued that the field could not be defined by any particular theoretical tenets — not drive theory, not the structural model, not the concepts of transference and resistance. Theories were replaceable conceptual tools. What defined psychoanalysis was its total approach: the scientific observer’s protracted empathic immersion into the inner life of the observed for the purpose of data-gathering and explanation.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) He traced this defining event not to Freud’s first published cases but to a moment in 1881 when Josef Breuer allowed his patient Anna O. to lead him into her “chimney-sweeping” — the cathartic talking that she herself insisted on continuing.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

Relationship to Classical Psychoanalysis

Kohut never positioned self psychology as a replacement for classical analysis, and this was not merely diplomatic caution. The complementarity principle was a genuine theoretical commitment: Guilty Man was real; the conflicts of the oedipal period were real; drive theory had real explanatory power within its domain.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) What he contested was the claim that conflict psychology was universal and sufficient — that every patient presenting with every kind of difficulty could be adequately understood within it.

The specific points of departure were several. The concept of analytic neutrality itself required clarification. Kohut argued that the analyst’s neutrality did not consist in the absence of responses — no human being could be wholly unresponsive — but in maintaining the position of the average expectable empathic observer; evenly hovering attention, the analyst’s counterpart of the analysand’s free association, was an active and sustained inner activity, not a passive withholding.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) Against Freud’s model of analytic technique, which recommended the emotional coldness of the surgeon, Kohut pointed out that Freud himself had not practiced what he preached — his 1927 letter to the pastor Oskar Pfister acknowledged the indispensable role of warm human concern in successful analysis.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) The muted, impersonal, restrained neutrality that had been appropriate for overstimulated patients presenting with the structural neuroses of Freud’s era was not appropriate — indeed was actively harmful — for the understimulated patients with self pathology who had become increasingly prevalent.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

Against the standard analytic interpretation of rage as the release of aggressive drive energy, Kohut argued that the rage of narcissistic patients was narcissistic rage — not aggression loosened from its defenses by a correct interpretation, but rage produced by the repetition of the childhood experience of a nonempathic self-object.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) Interpreting such rage as primary aggression confirmed for the patient the traumatic childhood experience rather than offering understanding of it, producing an iatrogenic reinforcement of the very wound the analyst was supposed to help heal.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

The proper analytic stance toward self-object transferences — whether mirroring transferences in which the patient needed the analyst’s confirming admiration, or idealizing transferences in which the patient needed to look up to the analyst — was neither encouragement nor discouragement; it was the maintenance of an interpretive position that explains the genetic and dynamic meaning of the transference without forcibly redirecting it.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) Breakthroughs of archaic grandiosity or idealization during analysis are not regressions to be interpreted away; they are forward movements — the self reaching back to retrieve developmental needs that were left unmet and must now be met for the first time.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

The essential transference in any given analysis was, in Kohut’s view, predominantly predetermined by the patient’s internal structure, not shaped by the analyst’s choices. The analyst’s influence operated only insofar as correct or incorrect empathic readings either promoted or impeded the patient’s progress on a path that had largely been set before the analysis began.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) He acknowledged one class of exception: rare cases in which a patient’s nuclear self had a genuine structural choice between rehabilitation through mirroring and rehabilitation through idealization. In such cases — and Kohut emphasized their rarity — the analyst’s own personality might influence which of two essentially valid solutions was reached.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) The case of Mrs. Y. illustrated the point from its negative: a first analyst had repeatedly interpreted her idealizing transference as a defense and worked to dismantle it; a second analyst allowed the idealization to establish itself and be worked through, and Mrs. Y. made substantial therapeutic gains confirmed by independent observers.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

The deeper friction with the classical tradition was Kohut’s critique of Freud’s personality. He proposed that Freud’s nuclear self was organized around the function of perceiving, thinking, and knowing — that his supreme value was courageous confrontation with truth, and that this value shaped the theoretical framework he built.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) Freud’s narcissistic vulnerability was located specifically in the exhibitionistic area: he was paradoxically more comfortable under attack than when receiving open admiration, could not accept praise at face value, and was conspicuously unable to immerse himself in modern art or music.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) Kohut attributed this to a sector of Freud’s personality — the narcissistic sector — that his self-analysis had not adequately addressed, and speculated that this unanalyzed sector had shaped Freud’s theoretical preferences, including his relative inattention to the vicissitudes of self-cohesion and disintegration that the great modern artists had already been mapping for decades.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

Kohut situated the growing prevalence of self pathology in a historical change.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) The environment that previous generations had experienced as threateningly close — overstimulating, erotically charged, the source of structural conflict — was now experienced as threateningly distant: empty, unresponsive, understimulating.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) The pathogenic parents behind structural neurosis had been neurotic themselves, acting out their conflicts through the child; the pathogenic parents behind self pathology were themselves suffering from disorders of the self and could not provide the empathic responses the child’s nascent self required.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) This shift was also registered in social structure: small families, parents absent from the home, decreasing presence of servants — these conditions either created an understimulating, lonely environment for the child or exposed the child, without possibility of relief, to the pathogenic influence of a parent suffering from self pathology, with no alternate self-object available to compensate.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) It was, for Kohut, the dominant psychological condition of the late modern West.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) The great artists of the day had already been mapping it: through tone and word, on canvas and in stone, they described the crumbling, decomposing, fragmenting self of the understimulated child and, later, the fragile, vulnerable, empty self of the adult — and attempted, through art itself, to provide what the culture had failed to offer.(Kohut, Heinz, 1977) Eugene O’Neill’s line, cited near the close of The Restoration of the Self, stood as Kohut’s summation: “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.”(Kohut, Heinz, 1977)

Human Notes

See Also

• psychoanalysis
• sigmund-freud
• narcissism
• self-psychology
• empathy

Sources

Editorial Notes

Gaps the encyclopaedia compiler flagged for future evidence work, collected from inline markers in the body and frontmatter.

The Nuclear Self and Selfobjects