Recent Psychoanalytic Thought: The Contemporary Americans (Session II)
Key Figure: Heinz Kohut
Key Concepts: Importance of Shame and Self Esteem / Ambitions and Ideals / Self and Self Objects / Grandiose Self / Mirroring and the Mirror Transference / Idealized Parent and Idealizing Transference / Vertical and Horizontal Splits / Primary and Secondary Ambition
Instructor: Robert Bergman, MD, Training and Consulting Analyst in SPSI
In the first half century of the history of psychoanalysis, conflicts fueled by guilt were predominant in theory and practice. People who came for analysis were pretty clear on who they were, where they stood in society and what rules they were supposed to follow, but they were troubled by breaking the rules or just wanting to. Gradually, however, as society fragmented and economic development and urbanization broke up traditional family life, people were much less certain of their identity, where they stood and what the rules were. Insecurity and shame became the main source of disturbance. In the 1960s and 70s, Heinz Kohut introduced a way of understanding and treating that kind of trouble. His starting point was Freud’s observation that in some kinds of relationships the two people experience each other as parts of themselves. Kohut called people to whom we are attached in that way selfobjects and in a series of publications he showed how deficiencies and other problems in selfobject relations caused suffering and how analysis could heal. We will follow the development of his thought and explore its relevance to our clinical work.
