Is there a concept more central to Kohut’s Self Psychology than the selfobject transference? Hard to imagine. The notion of the selfobject transference revolutionized our understanding of transference, turning our focus from interpretation of distortion and displacement to facilitation of renewed development. Working from an empathic perspective,...
Read MoreIntersubjective Self Psychology I: Empathy – More Than Just Kindness – September 25, 2015
Empathy at the center of self psychological treatment? Revolutionary! Intersubjective Self Psychologists aspire to understand the patient from within her or his own world. When we do this things begin to make sense and we can understand motivations and resistances, interpersonal problems and symptoms in a way that can more deeply reach our patients; the...
Read MoreIntegrating the Irrationality of Wide-Scale Trauma: Results of a Self-Psychological Research Study – September 18, 2015
What does your involvement in trauma mean to you? Do you think it was somehow “meant to be?” For some survivors, the meaning of trauma centers around its irrationality or absurdity. Please join Koichi Togashi and me in a discussion of these aspects of trauma. We’d like to tell you about our self-psychological study of survivors of the 9-11 terrorist...
Read MoreKohut’s Twinship Across Cultures: The Psychology of Being Human by Koichi Togashi and Amanda Kottler
At the end of his life, Kohut articulated the twinship experience, which has become a cornerstone of self psychology. But, I believe, it has been insufficiently conceptualized. In Kohut’s Twinship Across Cultures: The Psychology of Being Human, Amanda Kottler and I reflect on the twinship experience and develop it further. Picking up where Kohut...
Read MoreCoping with Shame – An Intersubjective Self Psychological Perspective – June 5th, 2015
Shame – a powerful and destabilizing emotion – is a focus of treatment for so many in psychoanalytic therapy. Shame develops when affects and patterns of relating are felt to be unacceptable to important others. Such experiences are then not allowed into consciousness, left instead to become a sense of “defectiveness or badness . . . accompanied by...
Read MoreChallenging the Success-Failure Polarity in Self Psychological Practice – May 8th, 2015
Can we ever say that a therapeutic relationship is a complete success? Or a complete failure? Or are these relationships, like the humans involved, too complicated to reduce to this simple binary? As Lou Agosta suggests, “If a practice or method such as psychoanalysis cannot fail, then can it really succeed?” Some self psychologists believe...
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