[1] Essential to understanding self psychology are the concepts of empathy, selfobject, mirroring, idealising, alter ego/twinship and the tripolar self.
Though self psychology also recognizes certain drives, conflicts, and complexes present in Freudian psychodynamic theory, these are understood within a different framework.
Subsequently, "in a burst of creativity that began in the mid-1960s ... Kohut found his voice and explored narcissism in new ways that led to what he ended up calling a 'psychology of the self'".
[5] For Kohut, the loss of the other and the other's self-object ("selfobject") function (see below) leaves the individual apathetic, lethargic, empty of the feeling of life, and without vitality – in short, depressed.
For Kohut, the implicit bond of empathy itself has a curative effect, but he also warned that 'the psychoanalyst ... must also be able to relinquish the empathic attitude' to maintain intellectual integrity, and that 'empathy, especially when it is surrounded by an attitude of wanting to cure directly ... may rest on the therapist's unresolved omnipotence fantasies'.
For instance, a person's particular habits, choice of education and work, taste in life partners, may fulfill a selfobject-function for that particular individual.
Selfobjects are addressed throughout Kohut's theory, and include everything from the transference phenomenon in therapy, relatives, and items (for instance Linus van Pelt's security blanket): they 'thus cover the phenomena which were described by Winnicott[11] as transitional objects.
[15] Suboptimal frustrations, and maladaptations following them, may be compared to Freud's trauma concept, or to problem solution in the oedipal phase.
[5] Freud had early noted that 'The idea of the "double" ... sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which holds sway in the mind of the child.
[27] During Jung's midlife crisis, after his break with Freud, arguably 'the focus of the critical years had to be a struggle with narcissism: the loss of an idealized other, grandiosity in the sphere of the self, and resulting periods of narcissistic rage'.
On the assumption that 'the western self is embedded in a culture of narcissism ... implicated in the shift towards postmodernity',[29] opportunities for making such applications will probably not decrease in the foreseeable future.
'[31] Offering no technical advances on standard analytic methods in 'his breathtakingly unreadable The Analysis of the Self', Kohut simply seems to blame parental deficit for all childhood difficulties, disregarding the inherent conflicts of the drives: 'Where the orthodox Freudian sees sex everywhere, the Kohutian sees unempathic mothers everywhere – even in sex.
'[33] The danger in 'the concept of the sympathetic or empathic analyst who is led astray towards an ideal of devotion and samaritan helping ... [ignoring] its sadistic underpinnings'[34] seemed only too clear.
[36] With the passage of time, and the eclipse of grand narrative, it may now be possible to see the several strands of psychoanalytic theory less as fierce rivals and more 'as complementary partners.