Using Self Psychology in Psychotherapy

In recent years, Heinz Kohut and his followers have moved psychoanalytic therapy away from its primary concern with intrapsychic conflict to a focus on psychological deficiency. Today, the clinical concepts of self psychology so permeate our thinking about psychotherapy that it is hard to imagine a therapist who doesn't draw upon it in practice. It provides an additional model of psychic structure (the cohesive self), an expanded view of the therapeutic relationship (self object milieu), and, consequently, different interventions (empathy, mirroring, understanding, and explaining, rather than traditional interpretation). Self psychology offers a new perception of how pathology develops. It emerges, not from intra psychic conflict, but from the pervasive absence of empathically responsive self object in the child's inner and outer world. The goal of this book is to familiarize mental health professionals with this new approach to human behavior and demonstrate its implications for treatment in various stages of development and in a broad range of situations. Mental health professionals who are familiar with the concepts of self psychology will find this book useful in expanding their treatment ideas. For those who are unfamiliar with self psychology, this material will provide new, different, exciting, and effective ways of thinking about patients and intervening in the treatment relationship.

Helene Jackson, Ph.D., is on the faculty at Boston College, Graduate School of Social Work. As a recipient of an NIMH Clinical Faculty Scholar Award, she conducts national research on clinical bias and child abuse. Dr. Jackson received her MSW from Boston University and her doctorate from Smith College School for Social Work. She is in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts.