The Selfobject Concept: The Heart of Kohut’s Psychology of Health

Abstract

ABSTRACTKohut’s creation of the selfobject concept marks a point of departure for psychoanalysis—the moment when analysts began to shift their attention away from intrapsychic relationships and toward relational experiences, conscious and unconscious, that are key to understanding psychological development, psychopathology, and psychological treatment. While he continued to speak of the intrapsychic consequences of selfobject experience, Kohut’s concept of selfobject experience was and remains a relational concept, as it links self experience to the relational contexts in which self experience comes into being or is transformed. The selfobject concept brings into view the functional capacity one person may have to bring dimensions (or potential dimensions) of another person into being; it is singularly important, for it underscores our inescapable relational embeddedness. Selfobject experience describes a universal dimension of relationship, one that is key to treatment for many reasons, among them its relationship to transference. Clinical examples will illustrate selfobject experiences and varieties of selfobject transferences.