The Unacknowledged Knowledge and the Need for a Sanity-Confirming Selfobject

Abstract

This paper deals with a specific variation of therapeutic disruptions in which the patient’s inner experience in unacknowledged. The unfulfilled need of acknowledgement brings about intense distress and unmanageable pain, to the extent of making the patient question his or her own sanity. It is our understanding that the patient is craving for reappropriation of confiscated parts of his or her innermost self. This is communicated in the transference by not being able to tolerate the therapist’s separate psychological matrix. The therapist is required to suspend his or her own subjective experience temporarily, hereby permitting the exclusivity of the patient’s subjectivity. When the therapist is capable of meeting these extreme demands, the patient’s need of a “sanity-confirming” selfobject is answered, thus enabling restoration via acknowledging his or her knowledge. Heinz Kohut, the founder of self psychology, delineates in his third book (Kohut, 1984) how the spontaneously established selfobject transference is bound to be disrupted, time and again, by the therapist’s “unavoidable, yet only temporary and thus non-traumatic empathic failures—that is, his “optimal failures” (p. 66). It is the therapist’s duty in such incidents of disruption, indicated by the patient’s withdrawal, to search for any mistake he might have made. Kohut, as a rule, recommends that once a mistake is recognized the therapist should first acknowledge it nondefensively and then give the patient a “noncensorious interpretation” of the dynamics of his withdrawal. Kohut further argues that the therapist’s faulty responses become grist for the