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Relational Self Psychology
Abstract
Self psychology has evolved beyond Kohut’s original one person psychology into a two person intersubjective theory that we propose can now be best understood as belonging to, and developing through interaction with, the broad spectrum of theories that come under the umbrella of Relationality, which are characterized by some form of bi-directionality and mutual influence. Key to this development has been the restoration of the selfobject from psychic function to personhood with its own subjectivity upon which the patient can have and recognize an impact. Kohut’s conception of the therapeutic action of the acknowledging and repair of empathic failure can be expanded and enriched by relational ideas of mutual recognition, impact, complementarity, and the Third. Inputs from recent theoretical and experimental developments in the theories of attachment, dynamic systems, and trauma have also contributed to the evolution of what we believe is now a fully Relational Self Psychology.
... The importance of empathy in supportive parenting is well known (Manczak et al., 2016). Empathy is defined as a modality that allows the other person to feel genuinely understood (Magid & Shane, 2017). Davis (2004) treats empathy as a construct encompassing four cognitive and emotional dimensions: perspective taking (an ability to spontaneously adopt the perspectives of other people), fantasy (a tendency to identify with characters in fictional situations), empathic concern (feelings of warmth, compassion, and concern for others), and personal distress (personal feelings of anxious, discomfort and helpless at tense emotional situations, e.g., emergencies). ...
It is expected that children are going to respond with anger and resentment to some of their parents’ child rearing and disciplinary decisions. Parents may perceive intense emotional reactions by children as an “attack” on them, challenging their ability to provide a supportive parental thoughtful responses. The present study examines the role of parental sense of competence and parental resilience, as well as parental empathy and aggression in fathers’ reactions to children’s negative emotions (FRCNE) in the context of such parental decisions. Study 1, assessed the role of paternal competence and resilience in fathers’ reactions to their children’s negative emotions. Findings showed that both paternal competence and resilience were associated with less negative parental reaction such as punishment toward the child but not with more positive reaction like calming down the child. Extending Study 1, Study 2, examined whether paternal empathy and aggression would associate with paternal positive responses. Findings showed that paternal greater empathy was associated with fathers’ higher likelihood to respond positively to child frustrations. Considered together, the findings of the two studies suggest that the importance of both paternal resilience and empathy in addressing and managing children’s reactions to frustration. Implications for intervention are discussed.
... Therapists struggle to expand their patients' consciousness and to connect them with dissociated parts of themselves by constructing affectively attuned, containing, and experience-near interpretations (Magid & Shane, 2017). In their interpretations, they employ a language 'woven with emotion' to describe the context and the meanings of the patients' experiences, thoughts, passions, and feelings (Stern, 1997, p. 40). ...
Similarly to therapists' interpretations, supervisors' constructions of their supervisees' therapeutic narratives emanate initially from complex internal processes which, during and after their articulation, undergo a sequence of amendments. These amendments occur in supervision when supervisors respond to validating responses of both the supervisees and the absent–present patients. Ogden (2005; International Journal of Psychoanalysis 86(5): 1265–80) recommends that supervisors develop tolerance toward ambiguity and doubts about the meaning of their supervisees' therapeutic narratives. I suggest that, in parallel, they need to develop tolerance toward ambiguity and doubts about formulating their constructions before and while articulating them. Such tolerance helps supervisors to bring their constructions closer to the supervisees' self‐experiences and to strengthen the sense of partnership with their supervisees in their struggle to understand patients' experiences and therapeutic processes.
... Although commonalities have been identified through shared clinical and philosophical assumptions (Gabbard, 2017;McWilliams, 2004;Shedler, 2010;Summers, 2013), significant diversity remains within the psychoanalytic community regarding many key clinical and theoretical concerns. Each major theoretical stream has a well delineated clinical and theoretical trajectory (i.e., Barsness, 2017;Hirsch, 2014;Magid & Shane, 2017) whose adherents often congregate in separate institutes that may be accredited by different accrediting bodies; hold different professional conferences dedicated to their own perspective; and publish in journals with discreet editorial processes dedicated to advancing specific viewpoints (Stepansky, 2009). It is not unreasonable to ask, given the sometimes strident disagreement in what constitutes psychoanalytic clinical work: How are we to find agreement on a set of competencies that are both inclusive enough to capture the rich diversity in psychoanalytic thinking, yet specific enough to clearly identify competence in the application of psychoanalytic clinical methods as distinct from those offered by cognitivebehavioral, family systems, or any other generally accepted theoretical approach? ...
Although the field of professional psychology has moved to an increased emphasis on assessing trainees' clinical competencies (Roberts, Borden, Christiansen, & Lopez, 2005), the field of psychoanalysis has lagged behind. A few psychoanalytic competency models have begun to emerge (e.g., Barsness, 2017; Cabaniss, 2008; Lemma, Roth, & Pilling, 2008; Morris, Javier, & Herron, 2015; Tuckett, 2005); however, these models primarily focus on full analytic training in postdoctoral institutes, tend to not set benchmarks of what competencies may be expected at different developmental points across a training sequence, and are often described at a level of detail that renders the model impractical for regular use in evaluating student learning. As such, the current article addresses this important gap in the literature by specifying a competency model of psychoanalytically informed psychotherapy that may be used in conjunction with existing American Psychological Association competency benchmark documents (e.g., Fouad et al., 2009), and may serve as a tool for psychoanalytic psychotherapy training in doctoral programs in clinical and counseling psychology.
From the beginning, self psychology has been criticized for failing to adequately address aggression. This critique is explored beginning with Heinz Kohut’s position on aggression and then moving to discuss Joseph Lichtenberg’s proposals concerning aggression and aversiveness, the aversive motivational system. In a number of clinical vignettes, the process of developing new, adaptive developmental capacities in the aversive motivational system are described. Additionally, a focus on diversity, culture, and bias which spontaneously became activated between the analytic partners is included.
This article describes the evolution of a critical dimension of self psychology that has evolved since Heinz Kohut’s death, one characterized by the transition from a one-person to a two-person psychology. This transition involved, initially, the change in the analyst’s role as limited to interpreting the patient’s intrapsychically generated selfobject experiences of development, rupture, and repair, to an emergence into full personhood; second, a new emphasis on the analyst’s subjectivity participating in a bi-directional relationship of mutuality rather than a unidirectional provision of needed functions; and finally, an overall approach to the therapeutic process as a complex, dynamic system. This emergent paradigm within self psychology we term relational self psychology. We illustrate its evolution through a historical review of critical papers that extended and transformed Kohut’s original vision, which already contained the seeds of a genuinely intersubjective and relational model. We outline these changes in four sections: (I) “Empathy and Beyond,” detailing the concept’s evolution within Kohut’s writing and its subsequent elaboration; (II) “From Provision to Mutuality,” describing the movement beyond Kohut’s focus on understanding and explaining and the mutative force of optimal frustration; (III) “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” discussing infant research emphasizing face-to-face interaction and mutual regulation moving into the development of a truly bi-directional model of therapeutic action; and finally, (IV) “From Dyads to Systems,” integrating self psychology into a broader intersubjective, relational, dynamic system and theoretical context. Each section concludes with a bibliography of seminal-related articles that may offer a syllabus for further study.
In keeping with the movement toward refining clinical theories and working with experience-near phenomena in the analytic situation, in this paper we are asking how we recognize change and how we know what particular interactional sequences between analyst and analysand have transmutative power. Following disruption-repair sequences in the therapeutic relationship sheds light on the process of change. Disruption-repair sequences not only re-establish the connection between therapist and patient, they also promote new levels of understanding for both parties in the dyad. Because such sequences are frequent in the course of treatment, they are particularly useful in creating and recognizing modifications in the patient’s defenses and related symptoms. In this paper, we track verbatim interchanges between analyst and analysand during two specific episodes of disruption-repair as a vehicle for understanding and illustrating the process of therapeutic change. This close tracking allows us to notice shifts in self-states within the analysand between trailing edge archaic selfobject mergers and forward edge strivings and transference as well as shifts in the therapeutic relationship.
Empathy and Recognition represent two closely intertwined, crucial elements of human relatedness, and thus of the analytic relationship. Each ushers in a different quality of relatedness in the dyad: Empathy is a response to a basic human need, crucial to psychic safety and coherence, and may be imagined ahead of time as the need for someone to understand one’s experience, to get one’s pain. By contrast, recognition as a longing may be only partially formulated before it is emergent, because it is in the moments when it is realized that the desire for its inherent mutuality may be most keenly felt. It is in such moments, often arising through collision and unpacking between two distinct and suddenly more fully knowable subjectivities, that the experience of desire may be both held and renewed. Recent relational writing has made clear how deeply intersubjective empathy may be, in its fullest realization; however, with recognition, the desire for the other as other, who may now be known as such, arises anew out of the experience of being met in intersubjective encounter. Like bread and roses, both are vital as felt experience, and in potentiating transformation.
Rachel Kabasakalian McKay’s (this issue) important contribution focuses on a comparison of “empathy” and “recognition.” In her paper, McKay compares the sensibility of responsive attunement that she associates with empathy to the sensibility of distinctiveness that she connects to recognition. This discussion takes up this comparison of empathy and recognition associated with their embeddedness in self-psychology in contrast to relational and intersubjectivity theories. In the author’s view, the essential tension between autonomy and at-one-ness is necessary to both empathy and recognition and should not be split between them. Because recognition is Benjamin’s fundamental idea, the foundation of intersubjective recognition theory, it is incumbent on us to develop and elaborate the precise technical meanings, denotations, and connotations of this term, along with its clinical and social implications. The author believes that the key to this project is to see that, for Benjamin, recognition occurs throughout life across developmental levels and thus actually refers to quite different, although deeply related, phenomena.
In Beyond Doer and Done To, Jessica Benjamin, author of the path-breaking Bonds of Love, expands her theory of mutual recognition and its breakdown into the complementarity of "doer and done to." Her innovative theory charts the growth of the Third in early development through the movement between recognition and breakdown, and shows how it parallels the enactments in the psychoanalytic relationship. Benjamin's recognition theory illuminates the radical potential of acknowledgment in healing both individual and social trauma, in creating relational repair in the transformational space of thirdness. Benjamin's unique formulations of intersubjectivity make essential reading for both psychoanalytic therapists and theorists in the humanities and social sciences.
This paper provides an overview of how Erich Fromm’s works influenced contemporary relational and intersubjective approaches. It stresses Fromm’s humanistic and existential sensibility, his explanation of how different socioeconomic and cultural contexts mold different character types, and how his center-to-center relatedness in clinical work all contribute to psychic change. The author shows how these dimensions intersect and add to current interests in relational psychoanalysis.
Three principles of salience (POSs) describe interaction structures in the 1st yr of life. Ongoing regulations (ORs), disruption and repair (DAR), and heightened affective moments (HAMs) are variations on the ways in which expectancies of social interactions are organized. The term
ORs captures the pattern of repeated interactions.
DAR describes a specific sequence in the broad pattern. In
HAMs, 1 dramatic moment stands out in time. The POSs constitute criteria by which interactions will be categorized and represented at a presymbolic (PS) level, and can illuminate the origins of both representation (REP) and internalization (INTL). Interactive regulation (REG) is the central concept in both. It is proposed that INTL is not distinct from the organization (ORG) of REPs. The expectation and PS REP of the dyadic modes of REG, as organized by the POSs, constitute the inner ORG. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Important advances have recently been made in studying emotions in infants and the nature of emotional communication between infants and adults. Infant emotions and emotional communications are far more organized than previously thought. Infants display a variety of discrete affective expressions that are appropriate to the nature of events and their context. They also appreciate the emotional meaning of the affective displays of caretakers. The emotional expressions of the infant and the caretaker function to allow them to mutually regulate their interactions. Indeed, it appears that a major determinant of children's development is related to the operation of this communication system. Positive development may be associated with the experience of coordinated interactions characterized by frequent reparations of interactive errors and the transformation of negative affect into positive affect, whereas negative development appears to be associated with sustained periods of interactive failure and negative affect.
During early development, every human being is exposed to the relative impact of relational trauma – disconfirmation of aspects of oneself as having legitimate existence in the world of others – in shaping both the capacity for spontaneous human relatedness and the relative vulnerability to “adult-onset trauma.” To one degree or another, a wave of dysregulated affect – a dissociated “tsunami” – hits the immature mind, and if left relationally unprocessed leaves a fearful shadow that weakens future ability to regulate affect in an interpersonal context and reduces the capacity to trust, sometimes even experience, authentic human discourse.
Part I of the paper takes up the question of how it is possible for the analyst to see, experience, or understand the countertransference, which is exactly what her unconscious involvement with the patient blinds her to. Must the eye perform the impossible task of seeing itself? A clinical vignette illustrates the problem. The means by which we generally dig ourselves out is our development of an awareness of vague affective hints, or chafings. Yet the problem remains: Why should we be any more able to grasp affective clues to our involvement than we are to grasp our involvement itself? In Part II I suggest that clues that help in thinking about the dilemma of the eye seeing itself are to be found in the examination of dissociation and the conception of the self as multiple. This line of thought leads into the presentation of an interpersonal-relational theory of enactment. Therapeutic action depends upon the creation of new internal conflict between states of self. The clinical material is explored along these lines. Part III returns to the riddle of the eye seeing itself, showing that the problem is insoluble only as long as mind is conceived to be unitary and undivided (“singlemindedness”). If consciousness is multiple, the dilemma disappears.
In this paper I present a model for psychoanalysis that builds on the developmental systems self psychology I developed in 1997 with Morton Shane and Mary Gales. That model incorporated aspects of self psychology, attachment theory, infant research data, and nonlinear systems thinking. The theory is discussed not only on its own merits, but also in the context of its shared sensibility with other relational self psychologies, intersubjective systems theory, and ideas drawn from the relational perspective. Six features of Kohut's self psychology are addressed and described both in the way I now consider each of them and as they compare and contrast with aspects of the other theoretical perspectives I have referred to. Specific additions to the 1997 model are featured, along with particular attention to some conceptual reformulations, including the concepts of "positive new experience" and transference.
This article locates self psychology within the context of the evolving paradigm for psychoanalysis that the author calls intersubjectivity theory. It is argued that Kohut contributed significantly to the new paradigm but stopped short of fully embracing it. Self psychology and intersubjectivity theory are compared and contrasted, and an intersubjective view is offered of the patient's transference, the analyst's transference, and the system created by their reciprocal interaction.
This paper reinterprets the historical problem of penis envy, that is, the girl's wish to be masculine, in terms of a developmental need to identify with father. Many of the problems posed by earlier analyses of femininity can be clarified by recognizing that before the girl “turns”; to the oedipal father as love object, she looks to the rapprochement father for identification. Identification is not merely an internal structure, it is a relationship in which the subject recognizes herself or himself in the other. In rapprochement, love of the father, who symbolically represents the outside world, takes the place of the practicing toddler's “love affair with the world.”; This identificatory love of the father, initially noticed in boys by Freud and later authors, is often frustrated by the father's absence or inability to recognize the daughter. This frustrated longing takes the penis as its symbol of likeness. The pre‐oedipal over‐inclusive phase of identification with the other sex parent is not superceded by the oedipal constellation, but is integrated with it. Thus identification becomes an important basis of the love of the other: it is not so much the opposite of object love as an important precursor and ongoing constituent of it. Case material illustrates the multiple possibilities of identificatory love and use of phallic symbolism to represent them.
This paper considers the historical isolation of psychoanalysis from other scientific academic disciplines. The example of behavior genetics is used to illustrate the potential mutual benefit of cross-fertilization. Exploring links between the two disciplines makes it possible to debate antipsycho-analytic constructions in behavior genetics with greater vigor. At the same time, psychoanalysis, which studies subjectivity, is relevant to a discipline that naively explores the objective environment without considering the crucial mediation through the subjective world. Microbiology and genetics offer models of the mechanisms by which meaning generation and interpretive capacity might interface with the unfolding of genetic expression. Simultaneously, emerging psychoanalytic developmental models have provided an ontogenetic psychological framework that links development of this capacity to the infant-mother relationship. The paper concludes by stressing the need for a cadre of specialist psychoanalytic professionals dedicated to research as the precondition of any meaningful dialogue between psychoanalysis and any other discipline.
Almost all psychoanalytic theorizing posits some basic and presumably built-in motivational thrusts. The goal of this paper is to present an alternative way of thinking about the beginnings of motivation. I go into some detail about recent contributions from two areas of research: dynamic systems theory as applied by Esther Thelen to infantile motor development and Gerald Edelman's (1992) theory of “Neural Darwinism.” What emerges are two interlocking hypotheses: The first is that what we infer as drives or other versions of “basic” motivations are already a late development of motivational organizations that started out from a collection of rather primitive biases. The second hypothesis, based on dynamic systems thinking or complexity theory, is that a great many developmental features that appear to be driven by a built-in genetic program or design, are, in fact, the spontaneously emergent, and therefore the never completely predictable, resultant of the interplay of embedded, embodied, and environmental elements. It is also hypothesized that, just as motivational systems lead to the emergence of new capacities and functions, so too do new capacities beget new motivational derivatives in an ever-more complex developmental spiral. Early experience plays an enormously important and highly individual role in the creation of conative patterns that eventually crystalize into what we, as observers and theoreticians, begin to categorize into systems of motivation. Depending on the observer and his or her frame of reference, certain motivational systems are held to be superordinate to others; these then are held up as basic motives. As psychoanalysts we currently find ourselves in a situation of competing organizational systems vying for prominence. The multiplicity of such systems speaks to our uncertainty and the need for further study to clarify the many questions that this line of thinking evokes. The second section of this paper explores the relations among need, wish, impulse, and defense as varieties of motivational systems that have already crystalized out of the early beginnings of motivation.
In his final contribution to the psychoanalytic literature published two months before his untimely death on December 21, 2000, the late Stephen A. Mitchell provided a brilliant synthesis of the interrelated ideas that hover around, and describe aspects of, the relational matrix of human experience. Relationality charts the emergence of the relational perspective in psychoanalysis by reviewing the contributions of Loewald, Fairbairn, Bowlby, and Sullivan, whose voices converge in apprehending the fundamental relationality of mind. Mitchell draws on the multiple dimensions of attachment, intersubjectivity, and systems theory in espousing a clinical approach equally notable for its responsiveness and.
The thesis is developed that envy affects the development of the capacity for gratitude and happiness and that it is connected with a specific aspect of earliest object relations and internalization processes rooted in orality. Envy adds to the infant's difficulties in building up his good object, "for he feels that the gratification of which he was deprived has been kept for itself by the breast that frustrated him." Illustrative case histories are used. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In his foundational work The Restoration of the Self, noted psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut boldly challenges what he called âthe limits of classical analytic theoryâ and the Freudian orthodoxy. Here Kohut proposes a âpsychology of the selfâ as a theory in its own rightâone that can stand beside the teachings of Freud and Jung. Using clinical data, Kohut explores issues such as the role of narcissism in personality, when a patient can be considered cured, and the oversimplifications and social biases that unduly influenced Freudian thought. This volume puts forth some of Kohutâs most influential ideas on achieving emotional health through a balanced, creative, and joyful sense of self. "Kohut speaks clearly from his identity as a psychoanalyst-healer, showing that he is more of a psychoanalyst than most, and yet calling for major theoretical revisions including a redefinition of the essence of psychoanalysis.ââAmerican Journal of Psychotherapy
Psychoanalyst, teacher, and scholar, Heinz Kohut was one of the twentieth century's most important intellectuals. A rebel according to many mainstream psychoanalysts, Kohut challenged Freudian orthodoxy and the medical control of psychoanalysis in America. In his highly influential book The Analysis of the Self, Kohut established the industry standard of the treatment of personality disorders for a generation of analysts. This volume, best known for its groundbreaking analysis of narcissism, is essential reading for scholars and practitioners seeking to understand human personality in its many incarnations. âKohut has done for narcissism what the novelist Charles Dickens did for poverty in the nineteenth century. Everyone always knew that both existed and were a problem. . . . The undoubted originality is to have put it together in a form which carries appeal to action.ââInternational Journal of Psychoanalysis
As I stated initially, the preceding report was presented in order to buttress the claim that the new psychology of the self is helpful in the clinical area, that it allows us to perceive meanings, or the significance of meanings, that were formerly not perceived by us, at least not consciously. This is not a theoretical presentation of the psychology of the self--the theoretical knowledge needed will have to be obtained elsewhere (see, in particular, Kohut, 1971, 1972, 1977 and Kohut & Wolf, 1978). In order to assist the reader I append a diagrammatic summary of the psychopathology of Mr Z as it was perceived by me in his two analyses. For the rest I hope that this case report will speak for itself.
In this paper, two clinical sequences are presented in an effort to describe the methods by which the analyst attempts to recognise, understand and verbally symbolize for himself and the analysand the specific nature of the moment-to-moment interplay of the analyst's subjective experience, the subjective experience of the analysand and the intersubjectively-generated experience of the analytic pair (the experience of the analytic third). The first clinical discussion describes how the intersubjective experience created by the analytic pair becomes accessible to the analyst in part through the analyst's experience of 'his own' reveries, forms of mental activity that often appear to be nothing more than narcissistic self-absorption, distractedness, compulsive rumination, daydreaming and the like. A second clinical account focuses on an instance in which the analyst's somatic delusion, in conjunction with the analysand's sensory experiences and body-related fantasies, served as a principal medium through which the analyst experienced and came to understand the meaning of the leading anxieties that were being (intersubjectively) generated.
Analytic work based on the intersubjective view of two participating subjectivities requires discipline rooted in an orientation to the structural conditions of thirdness. The author proposes a theory that includes an early form of thirdness involving union experiences and accommodation, called the one in the third, as well as later moral and symbolic forms of thirdness that introduce differentiation, the third in the one. Clinically, the concept of a co-created or shared intersubjective thirdness helps to elucidate the breakdown into the twoness of complementarity in impasses and enactments and suggests how recognition is restored through surrender.
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