Self Psychology Psychoanalysis
Treatment
It is the empathic process of understanding and explaining - paralleling the therapeutic process of traditional analysis - that allows the treatment to go forward and the self to acquire the missing structures in what Kohut (1984) describes as a three-step movement.
- First, there is the analysis of defense and resistance against the emergence of the new editions of the selfobject transference.
- Second, there is the unfolding of the various selfobject transferences and their working through.
- Third, there is the making possible the establishment of an empathic intuneness between the self and the selfobject on a more mature adult level.
In other words, self psychology does not view the mature self as achieving an ideal state of "separation-individuation," as certain object relations theory would suggest, but it maintains that even the mature self continues to have a need for mirroring, idealizing, and twinship selfobject experiences.
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