PREFACE
Self Psychology Page | Chicago Institute Lectures Forum | Lecture 1: Perversions
The 25 Chicago Institute Lectures originated in informal talks that Heinz Kohut gave to advanced students in classes he taught from 1972 to 1976. These were years of transition between The Analysis of the Self (1971) and The Restoration of the Self (1977; the ideas of the bipolar self and compensatory structure were first mentioned here). It was suggested to Kohut (by Paul Tolpin in 1980) that the talks would be useful for teaching his new theory of the self and that they should be published as a book. Kohut was doubtful. The talks were "off the cuff," entirely extemporaneous. A more important reservation, as he had told the students earlier (see Lecture 10) was, "I'm not yet so dear about what I'm talking about. I'm still struggling with ideas and have not nicely systematized them" (pp. 142-143).
Indeed, the lectures are not "nicely systematized." Not yet dear about the theoretical conceptualization of his clinical discoveries, Kohut frequently circles around the students' question, so to speak, before turning back to his answers. Thus the titles (which we added) do not reflect all the topics Kohut takes up in a given lecture. They pinpoint the main issue or issues in the center of his attention on a particular day, while an issue of equal or greater importance may be interwoven in the same lecture. For example, the title of Lecture 6 is simply "Mature Transformations of Narcissism." In it, however, Kohut describes his first discovery of a type of self-object transference in which the patient experiences the analyst as a central organizing and orienting point in his own psyche.
After reading several lectures that were edited (by Paul Tolpin), Kohut agreed that the series might be a useful teaching device. Then he did some editing of his own (Lectures 9, 11, 12, and 14) to clarify more precisely what he was trying to get at. His increasingly busy schedule and his illness, however, prevented further participation. Paul Tolpin continued the editing sporadically until we collaborated to complete the project.
The tapes had been transcribed and then typed on fragile, faded onion-skin paper, some pages single- and some double-spaced. The complex sentence structure was often Proustian and difficult to follow. Nevertheless, the lectures were fascinating. Here Kohut was at his teaching best. He responded to questions in an informal, spontaneous manner, letting his thoughts roam freely, thinking out loud about the issues the students raised. That style of teaching did not lead to his speaking in neat sentences. Our attempt to transform his spontaneous speech patterns, often influenced by German syntax and touched by his mood on a particular day, was not easy. Making the lectures readable was a good part of the work: we wanted to keep their flavor without making them sound like a prepared speech or that Kohut's thinking was always clear. We think his spontaneity and struggle to explain what was at first merely an ""aha"" in the psychoanalytic situation remains as an example of the original Kohut. The lectures are in Kohut's"voice."
Kohut began each meeting with the students with variations on, "So what shall we talk about today?" Sometimes he answered questions directly; sometimes he did not get back to a question. More often, like the Pied Piper, he would lead the class to where he wanted to go. He first shifted from the narrower specifics of a question; placed it in a larger conceptual framework; and, from that more experience-distant, over viewing position, returned to the question and clarified it by using the broader premise required to understand it at all. His broadest premise,concerning the normal development of narcissism and the self - its maintenance and restoration and the laying down of its structures, its dangers and defensive measures, and its transferences and resumed structural growth is the thread that runs through the lectures and holds them all together.
The students attended Kohut's classes to understand better The Analysis the Self and to integrate it into the ego psychology framework that informed that work and their own psychoanalytic thinking. This framework led almost automatically to their making a sharp dichotomy between neurotic and narcissistic patients. The former group were thought to have an unresolved nuclear Oedipus complex and were considered analyzable. Their narcissistic and preoedipal problems were thought of mainly as resistances and regressive escapes from the dangers arising from unconscious oedipal wishes. Patients with the noisy manifest symptoms and character traits that give narcissism a bad name (for example, intense rage, arrogance, envy,entitlement, inconstancy, and manipulativeness) were considered too"undifferentiated" to be analyzable. They were thought to be primarily fixated on "primitive" wishes and "archaic" objects. Prevailing ego-psychological views were that the primary fixations or permanent regressions of patients in this group made advances to object constancy, triadic oedipal phase relations, and genuine object love unlikely.
Kohut is saying that narcissistic patients' disorders do not, in fact, reflect "too much" untamed narcissism, libido or aggression. On the contrary, the primary disorder is the result of "too little" development of narcissistic (self) structures. These are core psychological configurations, which he called the grandiose exhibitionistic self and the idealized parent imago. The configurations consist of normal childrens' phase-appropriate feelings about their own greatness and that of their parents. Their claims to greatness and their parents' affirming, buffering, and modulating responses to them are integral to the maintenance and restoration of the self-structures and the gradual changes in them that channel greatness feelings into adult ambitions and ideals. (Kohut, intent on showing that naive grandiosity and idealization are the nucleus of positive childhood development and should not be mistaken for pathological narcissism when it is revived in transferences, continued to talk in drive psychology language.)
Kohut's new views on the self-structures and narcissistic transferences of patients who are deprived of the expectable parental gleam and expectable care are still not all that dear to the students. They ask Kohut over and over again, "How does your theory of the self fit with what we have already learned about the theory and practice of psychoanalysis? How do you differentiate narcissistic disorders from neurotic disorders?" Their repetitive questions show that the students are challenged by Kohut's bringing the self and its needs for a responsive self-object environment into the center of the analytic endeavor, that they intend to resolve the challenge for themselves. The students' integrative task is further complicated, however. At the time of the classes, Kohut was already going well beyond The Analysis of the Self. He is in the midst of what will prove later to be a radical theoretical transition. This is how he puts it in Lecture 9 (paraphrasing): "We talk about narcissism if you want to retain a transitional bridge to the old theoretical formulations, that is to drive theory - or, as we are more and more inclined we talk about disturbances that can best be formulated and best understood within the framework of the self, its development, its disturbances, its fragmentation" (and, it should be added, its reintegration).
The tentative move away from drive theory (narcissism, originally defined as the libidinal investment of the self, is a drive theory concept) and the structural theory of the mind (id, ego, superego) was forced on Kohut, as it were: to understand the psychological organization of the group of patients he delineates, it is necessary to shift to a broader frame of reference and place the total (supraordinate) self and the self-object environment in the center of developmental-clinical theory. Interestingly enough, Kohut does not hesitate to remind the students that his broader frame of reference "is not necessarily as good as the other because obviously it is not as yet well investigated. " Thus, Kohut is not yet able to articulate dearly the broader concept of a supraordinate self. The concept starts to take shape in The Restoration of the Self and assumes a more definitive form only in the posthumous How Does Analysis Cure? In Lecture 18 he is still inconsistent about a total self from the beginning on, provided it is accepted and included in an expathic self-object world. For example, in Lecture 18 he still maintains the classical psychoanalytic theory that there is an infantile stage of an objectless nonself consisting simply of separate erogenous-zone/body-part experiences; at the same time he seems to contradict himself and recognizes that there is always a core experience of an independent self with its own center of initiative - the baby does not simply experience an arm moving, but has the visceral experience we later articulate as "This is my arm. I'm moving it." Similarly, in Lectures 21 and 22 Kohut is still not dear about the oedipal phase and the Oedipus complex as part of a total self, and he maintains a strict separation between oedipal (neurotic) disorders and self-disorders.
Kohut's transition from drive theory to the psychology of the
self is at times exhilarating, at times confusing for the
students. They almost automatically organize their clinical
thinking and questions about patients around the theoretical
construct of a psychic apparatus that has the primary aim of
discharging drive wishes on any available object; an apparatus
that has to compromise and counter the primary aim of discharge
because of the conflict-engendering demands of reality and its
embodiment in demands of the ego and superego. Kohut's theory of
a total self and its primary needs for mirroring and idealizing
self-object experiences calls on the students to carry out three
complex learning tasks simultaneously. They must, first,
temporarily suspend their taken-for granted mode of
psychoanalytic thinking about a drive-processing psychic
apparatus and narcissism as an infantile fixation; second, they
must try to comprehend, empathically as well as intellectually, a
psychoanalytic psychology that encompasses drives while at the
same time it is organized around the self and its more primary
aims, strivings, and defenses; and, third, they must put into
actual practice their understanding of patients' needs for
self-object experiences when vulnerability and suffering is a
consequence of structural insufficiencies. A new theoretical
point of view cannot be integrated at once - it is not easy for
students to make the empathic and conceptual shifts necessary to
comprehend the self as a primary structure, a
structure that cannot be conceptualized in a framework of gross mechanical forces [processed by a psychic apparatus] or in relation to a genetic matrix of single events [such as the child's discovering the anatomical differences between the sexes] or even gross multiple events [like the intense passions and frustrations experienced in connection with oedipal phase wishes]. [The self] can be much better conceptualized from what we can now reconstruct from the reactivation of self pathology in the transference . . . when we recognize that [the expectable, structure-providing experience] is being born into an matrix of empathic responsiveness . . . that the child experiences as part of himself. . . . This experience of the functional self is what we now call the self-object experience. It is the subtle interplay - the minute, million-fold, repeated interplay of empathic or nonempathic response to the child's needs by important selfobjects that leads to the laying down of either sufficient structure in the child and a functional self or to faulty structure and self disorder [p. 337].
The broad premise that Kohut wants students of his theory to grasp is simple, once it has been articulated:
You see, the actual issue is really a simple one . . . a simple change in classical [Freudian] theory, which states that auto-erotism develops into narcissism and that narcissism develops into object love . . . there is a contrast and opposition between narcissism and object love. The[forward] movement toward maturation was toward object love. The movement from object love toward narcissism is a [backward]regressive movement toward a fixation point. To my mind [this] viewpoint is a theory built into a nonscientific value judgment . . . that has nothing to do with developmental psychology [pp.277-278].
Continuing with his premise regarding normal development, Kohut maintains that narcissism is not simply an infantile way station, a "lower" form of organization, on the way toward "higher" object love as Freud thought. Narcissism and object love coexist and mature alongside, and, to some extent, in relation to, one another. Both narcissism and object love undergo maturation over the life cycle, from the expectable forms of childhood and adolescence to forms and transformations of later life. "It is not that the self-experiences are given up and replaced by . . . a more mature or developmentally more advanced experience of objects." Kohut's theoretical clarification of self-investment and object investment as coequal and interrelated leads to his distinction between self-disorders and classical neurotic disorders. Neurotic disorders consist of specific kinds of defense mechanisms, character formations, symptoms, and unconscious structural conflicts. These can be satisfactorily treated by way of a theoretical point of view holding that they stem from the persisting unconscious wishes and objects of a childhood in which the Oedipus complex could not be resolved.(At this transitional point in self psychology, Kohut still insisted that his theory simply enriches understanding and treating patients with oedipal disorders.) Self-disorders, however, originate in another kind of childhood and other kinds of basic trauma whose essence cannot possibly be understood through either oedipal theory or other existing psychoanalytic theories.Rather, we are guided here by the childhood and traumatic experiences of children who lack the adequate responses of others, who are deprived of the reliable, positive interest of their surroundings. These children - later,patients - therefore do not have a sense of continuity in themselves or of the worth of their activities; they are uncertain about who they are, what they are,and where they are going (see Lecture 9).
When these children become adults, their suffering from "empty depression" and lethargy (contrasted with neurotic depressions attributable to unconscious guilt) is interrupted by rages because things are not going their way, because responses are not forthcoming in the way they expected and needed. Some of them may even search for conflict to relieve the pain and intense suffering of the poorly established self, the pain of the discontinuous, fragmenting, undercathected self of the child not seen or responded to as a unit of its own, not recognized as an independent self who wants to feel like somebody, who wants to go its own way (see Lecture 22). They are individuals whose disorders can be understood and treated only by taking into consideration the formative experiences in childhood of the total body-mind-self and its self-object environment - for instance, the experiences of joy of the total self feeling confirmed, which leads to pride, self-esteem, zest, and initiative; or the experiences of shame,loss of vitality, deadness, and depression of the self who does not have the feeling of being included, welcomed, and enjoyed.
We want to single out just one of the clinical moments that Kohut describes that are the route to two of his crucial discoveries: the discovery of self-object transferences as a second chance at structure formation; and the correlated discovery that symptoms conceptualized as failure to differentiate the self from the object reflect structural deficits that arise in connection with traumatic insufficiencies in the child's structure-providing parental environment. In Lecture 6, readers can follow the pivotal steps Kohut takes that lead to his conceptualization of a specific type of self-object transference in which the patient unconsciously experiences the analyst as an organizing point for a psyche that is poorly held together (see Kohut's 1977 discussion of this patient in The Restoration of the Self)..
The patient Kohut described was a university professor of outstanding intelligence who had been in analysis for a year. Kohut had told him that he would be away in New York for one week. In retrospect, he realized that he was on the verge of misunderstanding the patient's reaction to the impending separation. The patient had filled an analytic hour with a detailed enumeration of the bits and pieces that made up the contents of his trouser pocket. Kohut felt irritated and bored. He first thought that the patient's withdrawal and self-absorption was part of a defense, a retreat to narcissistic, obsessional preoccupations to ward off his rage at the analyst for abandoning him (the patient had been separated from his parents for over a year when he was three and a half years old). Something told Kohut, however, that his initial formulation about what the patient was experiencing and what he was defending himself against was wrong (he had suspended his usual theoretical position). Then he thought of something new - he had the idea that his boredom, impatience, and irritation were a countertransference that signaled his lack of understanding his patient's experience in depth.
To put this crucial step in the discovery process in theoretical terms: Kohut made use of introspection and empathy and realized that there was more to the profound change in the patient than revival of a three-year-old's rage over separation and loss, and a defensive regression to an earlier stage of narcissism, anality, or both. Following the advice he sometimes gave us in supervision and case discussions, he bit his tongue and thought some more. He did not persist in his idea of regression to a narcissistic position or to anal retentiveness to keep unconscious destructive impulses in a state of repression. (Nor did he make use of any of the object relations orientations that might suggest that the analyst's bored, irritated reaction was a result of projective identification, or that the patient had regressed to regain an infantile state of merged oneness that denied separation, rage, and destructiveness.) Instead, in this clinical moment he had a new vision of the meaning of the psychic reality of the upcoming separation for the patient. Kohut realized, first from a dream the patient told him after learning that the analyst would be away, that the patient was confused about his orientation in space. Then came an integrative step that connected the psychic reality in the here-and-now of the transference with the psychic reality of the separation in the past: the analyst had become the central orienting point in his inner world. The patient's inability to tell right from left, to tell east from west,was the manifest content of a profound deterioration in his thinking and in his inner state of integration. It was an intensification of a more subtle confusion and disorientation that he often experienced. To some extent, the patient did not know where he was, where he was going; he did not feel that he was all there when his self-object environment disappeared.
The additional conceptual steps that enabled Kohut to grasp the nature of the transference experience can be outlined briefly: in the analysis, the patient had taken a positive developmental step that reactivated his psychological need for confirming and strengthening responses - he made use of the analyst's mirroring and idealized functions as a new edition of childhood self-objects who were available. The analyst was a strengthening aspect of the patient's insufficiently organized structure. The transference bond made the patient feel more grounded and oriented in time and space.With his experience of loss of the analyst, the patient attempted to perform these self-organizing functions for himself, as he had done in his traumatic childhood when he had been abandoned. His obsessive-compulsive thinking and behavior was a defensive effort, a way to orient and organize himself as he had when he was a small child: knowing in minute detail what was in his pockets was a way of knowing where he was, of feeling himself to be in a familiar world. The fuzzy bits were reliably there, in place, intact. Their reliable presence was a concretized attempt to substitute for the self-object functions of the parents who had disappeared, functions that were not sufficiently taken over by the people now taking care of him. With this insight, Kohut was able to understand the little boy's insomnia and a fantasy game of traveling on his own body that he repetitively played. The game helped him endure his state of fragmentation. By way of his body games and his obsessional inventory of his possessions, he tried to allay his hypochondriacal fears, to counter his feelings of deadness and bolster his precarious cohesion. With his own mental inventions he could reassure himself that he was still there, that he still existed, that he was still the same "I." So the obsessions and compulsions of this man were not symptoms of his rage. What he was doing was to create one spot in the world that he had totally under control.
We think that the developmental-clinical theory Kohut elaborates in the lectures leads to a critical insight that takes us beyond the mental contents of the fragmenting or fragmented self seen by ego psychology, object relations theories, and earlier self psychologies. Each school of psychoanalytic thought has grappled with the same kinds of patients and the same problems that occupied Kohut. All the schools tried to solve the problems by fitting the patients into their particular theory of primitive wishes, defenses, and internal object relations. It is not the child's wishes and defenses, however,that split apart or destroy his or her objects or render them "bad," abandoning,and unavailable as "good" sources of orientation, sustenance, and self-esteem. It is not the child's own wishes and defenses that leave the self feeling empty of itself, insufficient, and unfulfilled. The part-objects, archaic objects, split-up objects, and the introjects posited by these theories are, rather, the carriers or symbolic elaborations of the experience of self-object faults and failures and of a self that does not hang together. Archaic self- and object representations and archaic wishes directed toward them are derivatives, if you will, of experiences of fragmentation, depletion and longings for self-object responsiveness that grow more intense, driven, and distorted the more they are disregard.
Kohut's expanded insights into the inner world, beyond that described by other schools of analytic thought, are the essence of the lectures and the basis for his conviction that many of the developmental-clinical problems that have plagued psychoanalysis now "fall by the wayside." We shall not enumerate all the problems and the solutions he takes up in the lectures. Instead, in the concluding section of this preface, we emphasize the clinical and developmental issues in the very center of the psychoanalytic endeavor that now fall into place.
The major developmental and clinical significance of Kohut's work is that it succeeds in providing psychoanalysis with a consistent and comprehensive picture of childhood psychic reality in normally expectable parental environments (there is a wide range of these) and, in contrast, in parental environments that are faulty or fail, at least in part, to meet essential developmental needs. That psychic reality is the core experience of being a self, an "I", either that is more or less firmly put together or that feels insufficient and is restricted not only by structural deficits but by the defenses used to protect itself from further injury and the danger of losing whatever self has been built up.
There is great clinical yield from applying self-psychological thinking to understanding the painful psychic reality of the infirm self and the transferences that patients establish in a helpful analytic environment. Kohut, however, realized that what is considered appropriate psychoanalytic technique does not support revival of defended against primary needs. In fact, so-called standard or classical psychoanalytic technique has been detrimental to genuine recovery. This realization led Kohut to a searching critique and redefinition of analytic neutrality and an expectable analytic environment.
First, Kohut's critique underlines
an old confusion that neutrality consists of a sterile emotional field in which the analyst must work antiseptically; that neutrality is a kind of physical and emotional zero point (see Freud, 1912, particularly p.115). An expectable empathic environment, the true zero point or baseline in analytic work is not some peculiarly remote emotionally desiccated behavior in which the therapist . . . doesn't answer questions or sits there as if he were an unintelligible god-like seer. That kind of behavior does not bring out any important psychological realities in patients, but it does produce peculiar artifacts that may then be misunderstood and interpreted as basic pathology. Of course it isn't essential pathology, but a reaction to mistreatment, although its may be an idiosyncratic reaction to mistreatment. But it leads, in essence to an iatrogenic disease [p. 325].
Kohut continues with his redefinition of analytic neutrality as
the average friendliness, warmth and empathic behavior that a patient has the right to expect from a person who has devoted his life to understanding why and how others feel as they do, who has devoted his life to empathically merging with them. . . . Otherwise there is a baseline to which the needful patient must first adapt himself [as in childhood] . . . and go along with it [p. 325].
This is not a growth-promoting adaptation to the analyst and the psychoanalytic situation. Instead, it is an adaptation that often repeats characterological defenses patients adopted in the nonoptimal self-object environments in which their self-disorders originated.
In the lectures, Kohut asks, "What do patients with disorders of the self need?" Although he clarifies and expands his answers to this crucial question in his subsequent writings, his answer at this time is unequivocal: "the strategy is not to [try to] provide a substitute for the self-object." Kohut tried very hard to dispel the mistaken notion that it is even possible for the analyst to substitute for childhood self-objects: he thought that there was only one effective way to respond to patients' intensified needs for structure-building self-object experiences, and that is empathically to understand and explain them. Understanding and explaining needs can help patients recover from the deprivations of the past, repeated in the present. This time the patient does not have to continue to wall off his or her old, unmodified narcissistic demands in order to master feelings of vulnerability. When the greatness claims are mobilized again in a selfobject transference, there is a second chance for their growth, change, and channeling into the direction-setting ambitions and idealized goals of a derailed self that gets back on track.
The Chicago Institute Lectures show how difficult it is to dearly formulate a really new psychoanalytic idea that significantly advances treatment. The lectures demonstrate Kohut's struggle to fully articulate his basic discovery:that for patients with self-disorders the self-object environment is to the resumption of structural growth what the expectable parental environment is to normal development throughout childhood. The conceptualization and systematic organization of the clinical discoveries from which the psychology of the self arose was a very long time in the making, and Kohut's ideas were still evolving at the time of his death. The discovery process called on him to suspend his accustomed way of thinking about psychic reality, to stretch empathically and intellectually in order to comprehend another psychoanalytic vision of reality that had not yet been comprehensively seen or understood even by those schools of thought that recognized the vital importance of the child's environment.
A letter Kohut wrote in 1980 (to Paul Tolpin) after a first reading of what is now Lecture22, demonstrates that he surprised himself when he realized how long he had been thinking about the problems he had tackled.
I glanced at pp in the 5/9/75 lecture. As you perhaps know . . . this topic [the position of the Oedipus complex in the self and in self-pathology and its treatment] has been in the very center of my interest in recent months. I had been writing on it when I got ill [in 1979 he had coronary artery bypass surgery]. When I began to work again I had to do the Chicago Conference summary (which does however contain a brief discussion of this topic), and then I went back to the interrupted book [How Does Analysis Cure?]. So it's interesting for me to see that I was talking about all this already in 1975 - although much more tentatively than in the Restoration of the Self (Chapter Five), and ever so much more tentatively than what I am in the process of writing about now. In the future I am already toying with going even further - I have already some outline in my mind.
The letter was signed, "So long, Heinz."
For psychoanalysts who know the history of our field, it should come as no surprise to learn that it took so long to develop a depth-psychological theory that further extends our view of the self and its inner world. Nor should it come as a surprise to learn that Kohut regarded the psychology of the self as incomplete. He was planning to go further in changing his own views, following an outline already in his mind. He went far enough in his discoveries, however, to change a whole climate of opinion about narcissism. The principles of treating the self constitute a psychoanalytic milestone that frees psychoanalysts and psychotherapists from the limitations of the narrower view of narcissism, aggression, sexuality, and self-disorders that prevailed in most quarters and fosters the growth and use of their own narcissism and their own self in the service of treatment goals.
Finally, the Chicago Institute Lectures, given during the tentative transition from the pathological view of narcissism to a view of narcissism of the normal self, afford clinicians the opportunity to make use of Kohut as teacher and clinical mentor. They afford scholars and students of psychoanalytic ideas the opportunity to follow along with Kohut in the years when he "had to look at the same things again and again until they themselves began to speak." And they afford all of us the chance to participate vicariously with Kohut and go through our own psychoanalytic transition to what promises to be the next era in the ongoing development of the field the era of the self.
1 Kohut was called Mr. Psychoanalysis by many of his colleagues particularly after his Presidency of the American Psychoanalytic Association and his activities in the International Psycho-Analytical Association.
2 "Structures" are abiding psychological configurations (mental states or patterns) that have a slow rate of change (Rapaport, D. & Gill, M. M., 1959. The points of view and assumptions of metapsychology. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 40:153-162). While there is considerable agreement among analysts as to the definition, there is wide disagreement about the constituents of primary structures. For self psychology, the primary abiding structures over the entire course of life consist of self-selfobject experiences; for Kleinians, infants' archaic drives, splitting defenses and archaic internal objects and part objects are abiding configurations; for most British Independents, influenced by Balint and Winnicott, and for most ego psychologists, infants' drive wishes and hallucinated oneness with archaic objects are primary structures.
3 On Freud's death W. H. Auden (1940) wrote, "to us he is no more a person/now but a whole climate of opinion" (p. 868).
4 Freud (1914) was quoting Charcot's advice on the discovery process, that you "had to look at the same things over and over again until they themselves begin to speak" (On the history of the psycho-analytic movement. Standard Edition, 14:7-66. London: Hogarth Press, 1963, p. 22).
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