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Whither the Self in Relational Self Psychology? A Comment on Magid, Fosshage & Shane’s Article

In their historical review which culminates in what Magid, Fosshage, and Shane have called Relational Self Psychology, the authors trace innovations since Kohut’s death in two areas: the concept of self and the concept of how change is created in psychoanalytic treatment. In this brief comment, I’d like to raise some questions about the first of these topics, the concept of self. While it is true that Kohut wrote about the “nuclear self” as a kind of structural entity, poised to unfold in the context of adequate selfobject responsiveness, the very notion of a selfobject matrix made Kohut’s self always a relational concept. A two person assumption is inherent in the concepts of both selfobject experience and selfobject transference. Over time, others continued Kohut’s project by making explicit what he had suggested only implicitly. In a memorable exchange during the 2006 International Conference on the Psychology of the Self, Marian Tolpin, responding to a plenary presentation by Dick Geist, complained that people were talking about Kohut having a one person theory, when in fact his notion of self was always a two person concept. Geist famously replied that while those who worked directly with him or his small group of close supporters were aware that clinically Kohut worked from a two person perspective, those of us who did not work directly with him could only go by his theoretical writing, which was in one person terms. In regard to Magid et al., I have a similar concern in relation to how these senior clinicans actually think and practice vs what they have written in this article. My concern is not with what the authors said, but with what they did not elaborate more explicitly. They carefully document the evolution and changes in both our concepts of self and our concept of how change comes about through the psychoanalytic relationship and process. In this endeavor, they very helpfully bring together many disparate ideas and clarify the connections between them. They do not with similar detail describe the continuities, however. In their focus on what’s new and what’s changed, do we ignore something that is old and still true, even necessary? After citing a number of postmodern psychoanalytic theorists, they state: