ABSTRACT
This supplementary chapter is a review that Morgenthaler wrote in 1973 of the Austrian-American psychoanalyst and pioneering self psychologist Heinz Kohut’s The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (1971). Considering Kohut’s book the most important contribution to psychoanalysis since Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1937 [1936]), Morgenthaler highlights its fundamental significance for both metapsychology and the theory of technique as it presents the innovative conception of an analysis of the self. He lauds Kohut’s introduction of the concepts of the grandiose self and the idealized parent imago to the metapsychology of narcissism as well as his related development of the technical suggestion to therapeutically reactivate these distinct manifestations of narcissism in the analytic situation. Concluding, Morgenthaler argues that rather than being limited to the realm of narcissistic development disorders, The Analysis of the Self holds profound insights for the conduct of almost all analyses.
