ABSTRACT
The “identity diffused,” unstructured, “narcissistic personality of our time,” the “Tragic Man” whose emergence was thought to have rendered the Freudian concept of “Guilty Man” obsolescent, turns out to be guilty after all. The deficits and defects characterizing the disordered self are not a direct result of inadequate provision, but result from the self-directed rage consequent upon trauma and deprivation. Whereas the “narcissistic neuroses” had been considered unanalyzable because they do not manifest “object-instinctual” transferences, Kohut usefully described their analyzable “selfobject” transferences. In light of infant research he redefined the concept of the selfobject as an object performing needed functions for the self not incompletely differentiated from it. The difference between views of the idealizing transference as resumption of a thwarted developmental need (Kohut) or as a defensive reaction to underlying destructive wishes (Kernberg) appears to arise from work with different patient populations. For Kohut, the therapeutic process involves a “disruption-repair cycle”: disruptions due to inevitable empathic failures are repaired by being understood as triggering painful states of fragmentation and depletion in vulnerable selves who may turn to substances or “driven” sexuality or aggression (“disintegration products”) in an attempt to hold themselves together. Three patterns of theorizing are distinguished. Self psychology displays elements of monistic and dualistic thinking; intersubjectivity theory is markedly dualistic; while Freudian theory displays both dualistic and dialectical trends. A range of dualisms are dialectically deconstructed. An extensive summary of the argument is presented.
