The Analysis of the Self
Narcissism reconsidered as a developmental line rather than a defence to be dismantled.
objects which are themselves experienced as part of the self. I shall refer to the latter as self-objects.
Published in 1971, this was Kohut's first sustained account of what became self psychology. Working from clinical material, he treats narcissism not as a defence to be reduced but as a line of development with its own course of maturation, running through the grandiose self and the idealized parent imago. He introduces the selfobject: another person experienced as part of the self and enlisted to hold its cohesion. In analysis these needs return as two workable configurations, the mirror transference and the idealizing transference, which he describes in fine detail. The analyst's disciplined empathy becomes the instrument of observation, the means by which such states are recognised rather than pathologised. Kohut sets out a systematic technique for the narcissistic personality disorders, showing how these transferences can be allowed to unfold and worked through. For the clinician, the book offers a vocabulary and a stance for patients who had resisted classical formulation.
About the author
Heinz Kohut
Heinz Kohut (1913 to 1981) was an Austrian-American psychoanalyst based in Chicago, where he practised at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis after emigrating from Vienna. He founded self psychology, recasting narcissism as a line of development in its own right rather than a defence to be overcome. His work treats the selfobject as central to psychic life, reads the mirror and idealizing transferences as its clinical expression, and positions empathy as the defining method of a psychology of the self.
Details
- 1971
- English
- University of Chicago Press
- University of Chicago Press, 1971
- 384
- 9780226450124