ABSTRACT
It is over a decade now that psychoanalysis has been explicitly confronted with the contributions to its theory and its technique offered by Heinz Kohut and his many collaborators first under the rubric of concern with the problems of narcissism and more recently under the declaredly more encompassing rubric of the psychology of the self. The two major landmarks in this progressive unfolding have been Kohut's first book (1971), The Analysis of the Self—subsequently declared to be the expression of the psychology of the self in the narrower sense, of self as content of the agencies of the mental apparatus, that is, as mental representations within the ego, id, and superego—and then Kohut's second book (1977), The Restoration of the Self—the elaboration of the psychology of the self in the declaredly broader sense, of self as a supraordinate constellation, with the drives and defenses (the central ingredients of the classical psychoanalytical conceptions of psychic functioning) subsumed as constituents of this self. This is the view of what has come to be called the bipolar self with, in its maturation, the crystallization of normally self-assertive ambitions as one pole and attained ideals and values as the other. The two poles are then connected by a tension arc of talents and skills.
