ABSTRACT
It is inevitable that psychoanalysts interested in developmental theory would seek correspondences between the work of Margaret Mahler (1979; Mahler and Furer, M., 1968; Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, A., 1975) and that of Heinz Kohut (1971, 1977, 1984), the two authors many recognize as having most significantly influenced American psychoanalysis in the current, postclassical era of object relations and self-development. Their methodologies, of course, were significantly different. Mahler based her theory on systematic observation and careful documentation of the psychologically relevant behavior of infants and toddlers in interaction with their parents, providing a view of the development of the “objective self,” a concept we put forward in an effort at integrating Kohut and Mahler (Shane and Shane, 1980). The term objective self in our formulation was based on the vantage point from which these observations on the development of the self were made. Kohut, unlike Mahler, derived his theory exclusively from the psychoanalytic situation, creating a view of the development of the “reconstructed self,” as we termed it in that same publication, based again on the vantage point from which his observations were made.
