Self Psychology: The Ethics of Oneness

A person's life and work, as recounted in a full-scale biography, is always a vibrant opportunity to touch the riddle's core, reflecting the sublime human yearning to see beyond the veil separating “I” from “other.” This is especially true in respect to Heinz Kohut, the founding father of self psychology. Strozier's (2001) monumental biography is used for a philosophical and historical scrutiny of Kohut's quest for the Grand Unity embodied in the monistic principle of holistic totality. This vision of laying the foundations of a supra-personal dimension in which the personal and the interpersonal amalgamate into an entangled universe is advocated as the spiritual core of Kohut's oeuvre. The vertical split between One Person Psychology and Two Person Psychology is, thus, healed by Kohut's revolutionary role in creating, explicitly and implicitly, a new kind of ethics in psychoanalysis: the ethics of Oneness.

The Givenness of Other People: On Singularity and Empathy in Husserl

Other people figure in our experience of the world; they strike us as unique and genuinely other. This paper explores whether a Husserlian account of empathy as the way in which we constitute an intersubjective world can account for the uniqueness and otherness of other people in our experience. I contend that it can’t. I begin by explicating Husserl’s theory of empathy, paying particular attention to the reduction to a purely egoic sphere and the steps that ostensibly permit a subject to re-inhabit a world of others from out of this sphere. In querying Husserl’s theory, I consider a series of problems, raised by Zhida Luo, concerning the apparent centrality of bodily similarity in empathy. I sketch Luo’s solution, which involves a shift to tactile similarity. While it makes for a better theory of empathy, this solution isn’t sufficient to make room for the givenness of another person not originally predicated on similarity. To clarify what’s at issue here, I turn to the Husserlian pictures of empathy presented by Heinz Kohut and Edith Stein. I conclude with a remark about what might be required, given the inability of Husserlian empathy to make room for the experience of others as singular and other, for a picture of our phenomenal life to have a shape that accounts for the coexistence of empathy to others who are like oneself and hospitality to others as genuine others.

A Case Formulation of Avoidant Personality based on Self Psychology Approach

The present paper focuses on Self Psychology Approach and a case study following this approach. First, Self Psychology Theory will be introduced following the main ideas of theory’s founder Heinz Kohut. In this part, the structure and development of self, selfobject needs and self disorders will be explained. Mainly, two selfobject needs (mirroring and idealizing need) will be the focus. Following this introduction to the theory, self-psychologically oriented psychotherapy process will be discussed along with its major intervention principles. Then, a case with avoidant personality characteristics will be introduced and formulated according to Self Psychology. The case will be conceptualized as a self disorder; and the narcissistic needs possibly not enough met during childhood will be emphasized. At the final part, the psychotherapy process, and experiences of the therapist will be shared. Through this study, it is aimed to highlight that psychotherapists should focus on clients’ needs, stay in the here-in-now, listen, make an effort to understand, and show this effort to the clients. It is also emphasized that ruptures during therapy should not be the moments that therapists should be afraid of, but instead they should be perceived as opportunities for the growth of clients as well as the therapeutic relationship. Keywords: Self psychology, avoidant personality, case study, self disorders, narcissistic needs

Empathy as core to the development of holding and recognition: the case of Garret

Heinz Kohut investigated empathy in psychoanalysis in the mid-1950s and found it to be a powerful way to connect to, and be with, his patients. Since then, relatively few recent clinical cases of empathy have emerged, while theoretical discussion of empathy seems to be the norm. Moreover, empathy has not been linked to the development of holding and recognition. The Winnicottian notion of the holding metaphor, which describes the mother holding her infant, has been controversial but continues to be used in therapy. Revised by relational theorists, holding is now viewed as co-created within the intersubjective space. Few recent clinical cases exist showing how and what holding looks like in therapy. The concept of recognition, also used in therapy, is defined as the ability to recognize and experience the other as a separate other. Clinical cases showing recognition in therapy are few in number. As far as I know, no clinical cases suggest that empathy is necessary before holding and recognition can emerge. In this paper, identifying these clinical case gaps in the literature, I describe a small verbatim section of a session with my patient, Garret, in which I attempt to; i) show the empathic process, thus adding to the scarcity of clinical cases, and, ii) show the experience of holding and recognition as they emerge in this case, and iii) suggest that empathy is a necessary core process to the development of the experience of holding and recognition.