ABSTRACT
Kohut (1992), in dealing with narcissistic clients, noticed that these people tended to treat him as if he were an extension of themselves, not as a person in his own right. He related this process to de®cits in the meeting of their early selfobject needs, which resulted in a ®xation and an attachment to archaic self objects. This pattern arises where early needs were not met in a way that enabled the infant over time to perform certain functions for himself through what Kohut referred to as `transmuting internalization' (Kohut, 1971, 1992: 49), an essential process in forming a secure sense of self. As referred to earlier, Kohut identi®ed three different types of selfobject or relational needs: the need for mirroring, the need for idealizing and the need for twinship (Kohut, 1984: 202±204). These are well elaborated by Tolpin (1997). Of the mirroring need she says: `The child self actively seeks out and expects an alive, brighteyed, engaged, mirroring parent to whom he says ``Look at me and admire and applaud me and what I can do'' ' (p. 5). This re¯ects the child's need for acceptance and appreciation. There is also a part of the child self that needs to look up to an admired (idealized) parent and to experience the self as enhanced by the other: `You're great, what you are and what you do is great; you belong to me, I belong to you, therefore I'm great too' (p. 5). Then there is the part of the child self that `looks for and expects alikeness, belonging, and kindred spirit experiences ± twinship/alterego experiences' so that the child is con®rmed in a sense of being acceptable as an equal and like the other (p. 5). These have subsequently been added to and extended, signi®cantly by the inclusion of the adversarial selfobject need (Wolf, 1988), which re¯ects the person's need to engage in confrontation with benevolent and resilient others and survive the confrontation. Kohut (1984) considered that the
function
of the process of therapy, that is, that the therapist would at times misattune and miss the client. What is important in this process is the opportunity that it offers for the client to voice his emotional response to such failures in an accepting, empathic relationship in which the therapist acknowledges his upset or anger and allows him the opportunity to express his distress without retaliating or abandoning the client. This process allows the client gradually to develop the internal resources to support himself through future failures by the process of transmuting internalization. In this way the client has an opportunity to `heal' the de®cits of the past and to engage in more rewarding relationships in the present.
