The Kohut Seminars: On Self Psychology and Psychotherapy With Adolescents and Young Adults

by Miriam Elson (Editor)

Hardcover; excellent condition; no scribbling notes; contains 318 pages

Genres: Psychology, Psychoanalysis

336 pages, Hardcover

First published September 17, 1987

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is not important to have conceptual clarity in our field all the time, at least certainly not from the beginning. Freud knew that. In his basic paper, "Narcissism, An Introduction," he makes the famous statement about the meaning of metapsychology, that it is the coping of the structure that can be discarded at will. The basis of what we do is always observation, observation only, and the interpretation of it. But the broader conceptualizations come and go. Neither in psychoanalysis nor in any of our related approaches do we deal with a conceptual framework that is simply stated on the basis of definition. We try to approximate it to what we observe.

When we speak about primary narcissism, my attempt would be to work from clinical experience in attempting to reconstruct developmental phases. This is the classical approach of depth psychology.

It seems to me that the concept of primary narcissism is one that is on a more experience-distant level, in other words, a libido distribution which falls into the period before Freud introduced the concept of aggression as a drive. It falls into a libido distribution when there was not yet any reaching out, or what later on would become object libido. But it was all diffusely concentrated on what? The self has not been formed yet either. In other words, it strikes me as a prepsychological concept, referring to a phase not yet psychologically definable. But it is not a useless concept.