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Self Psychology: Heinz Kohut
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Self psychology is a theoretical framework for understanding the psychological development of a child (Pessein & Young, 1993). The theory evolved from Freud's psychoanalysis, which examined mental processes, a body of psychological knowledge and a method of treatment for psychological illnesses. Post-Freudian analysts further developed and modified psychoanalytic theory, but stayed within Freud's theoretical framework. Heinz Kohut, the so-called "father" of self psychology, revised the basic tenets of psychoanalysis by focusing on empathy and introspection (Kohut, 1959). This shifted the focus of understanding the individual from the psychobiological foundations of the id, and the drives central to psychoanalysis to the psychological considerations of the self, it's development and tribulations. He developed self psychology as a study of the self and its relationship to selfobjects.
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Self psychology and intersubjectivity theory focus quite radically on experience both in theory building and in the process of psychotherapy. Intersubjectivity theory even proffers itself as a "psychoanalytic phenomenology," because of its dedication to understanding both experience and the structures of experience. Both Kohut (the founder of self psychology) and Stolorow et al (the intersubjectivists) posit that a theory of human experience must be built upon concepts which are in principle accessible to experience (Kohut, 1959; Atwood and Stolorow, 1984 ). They extract and separate out the clinical theory of psychoanalysis from classical metapsychology which is inaccessible to experience. They endeavor to understand clinical phenomena not in terms of drives and mechanisms, but in terms of self-experience. The concepts of gestalt therapy, such as gestalt formation, awareness, contact, and organismic self-regulation are ... "experience-near."While there is an important difference between "self-experience" and "self-regulation," in that the former is an exclusively psychological concept, the important point of agreement among the theories is the renunciation of metapsychology (drives, etc.) which cannot be checked against experience.
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Using Heinz Kohut’s self psychology model, the goal of therapy is to allow the patient to incorporate the missing self object functions that he needs into his internal psychic structure. Kohut calls this process transmuting internalization. In this sense, these patients’ psyches are “under construction” and therapy is a building time. In order to achieve this goal, a therapist does not just try to imagine what feelings a certain situation might evoke, but rather can feel what the patient felt in that situation. This has been referred to as “temporary indwelling.”[4,9] This empathy has been credited with being one of the vehicles for making lasting changes in therapy. Without it, the patient, whose self is too weak to tolerate more aggressive interpretation, would not benefit from therapy and in fact may suffer more damage.
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Kohut viewed self psychology, not as an interpersonal or object relations framework, but intrapsychically dynamic, placing selfobject theory at the center of self psychology. "The most fundamental finding of self psychology is that the emergence of the self requires more than the inborn tendency to organize experience." (E.S. Wolf, 1988, p. 11). The primary psychological task, for self psychology, is the maintenance of the self, and the relationships between the self and selfobject are at the center of development from birth to death (Tolpin, 1986). At the base of self structure is self esteem (Peoples, 1991).
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Heinz Kohut developed self-psychology theory at about the same time that Carl Rogers developed client-centered therapy - both were at the University of Chicago. At it's core, self psychology is psychoanalytic, but there are crucial differences in how the patient-therapist relationship is viewed. In psychoanalytic theory, the psychoanalyst keeps an emotional distance from the patient in order to objectively analyze the information received from the patient. In self psychology, the therapist uses empathy to gain the patient's trust. Once the patient trusts the therapist, he or she will talk more... enabling the therapist to gather more and better information and thus to make more accurate interpretations.
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This author relates the similarities between Sandplay Therapy and Self Psychology, by comparing the work of Heinz Kohut, the father of Self Psychology and Dora Kalff, the mother of Sandplay Therapy. Both approaches speak to the importance of the therapist, client relationship, with empathy and mirroring. The relationship of the self-object is described in both therapies. A partial sandplay process is described from the two perspectives. SANDPLAY AND SELF-PSYCHOLOGY
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Heinz Kohut