ABSTRACT
As we have seen, the self is the central configuration in Kohut's psychology. Kohut's main hypothesis, that the primary configurations that form the self are due to the child's relationships with its selfobjects, is derived from reconstructive work with his adult analysands. This work leads him to infer that the movement of the child's nuclear self, from isolated fragments to cohesive whole, depends upon the responsiveness of the child's selfobjects to its specific developmental needs. In Analysis of the Self, Kohut outlines these specific needs and delineates the two psychological configurations around which they center. One configuration, the grandiose self, concerns the mirroring, early maternal selfobject, whose responses accept and affirm the child's exhibitionistic narcissism. The other configuration, the idealized parental imago, concerns the merger with an idealized selfobject that brings a sense of perfection, safety and wholeness to the self. These two configurations are components of a supraordinate configuration that Kohut calls the 'bipolar self.' He expanded his earlier ideas and presented an in-depth discussion of the bipolar self in The Restoration of the Self (1977).
