Self psychology

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Part of a series of articles on Psychoanalysis

Constructs Psychosexual development Psychosocial development Conscious • Preconscious • Unconscious Psychic Apparatus Id, ego, and super-ego Libido • Drive Transference • Sublimation • Resistance Important figures Sigmund Freud • Carl Jung Alfred Adler • Otto Rank Anna Freud • Margaret Mahler Karen Horney • Jacques Lacan Ronald Fairbairn • Melanie Klein Harry Stack Sullivan Erik Erikson • Nancy Chodorow Susan Sutherland Isaacs Ernest Jones • Heinz Kohut Important works The Interpretation of Dreams Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" Civilization and Its Discontents Schools of thought Self psychology • Lacanian Analytical psychology • Object relations Interpersonal • Relational Ego psychology

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Self psychology is a school of psychoanalytic theory and therapy created by Heinz Kohut and developed in the United States. Self psychology explains psychopathology as being the result of disrupted or unmet developmental needs. Essential to understanding Self psychology are the concepts of empathy, self-object, mirroring, idealising, alter ego/twinship and the tripolar self. Though self psychology also recognizes certain drives, conflicts and complexes present in Freudian psychodynamic theory, these are understood within a different framework.

Empathy

Kohut maintained that the parents' failures to empathize with their children and the responses of their children to these failures were 'at the root of almost all psychopathology'[1].

Self-object

Idealizing

Alter ego/Twinship

Alter ego/Twinship needs concern the need to feel alikness to other human beings[1,2]. This need relaxes as development continues allowing a greater degree of difference from others to be accepted [1,2].

The Tripolar Self

The tripolar self is not associated with bipolar disorder, but is the sum of the three "poles" of the body. The first pole is the pole "grandiose-exhibitionistic needs," the second pole is of "the need for an omnipotent idealized figure," and the third pole is pole of "alter-ego needs." The tripolar self forms as a result of the needs of an individual binding with the interactions of other significant persons within the life of that individual.

References

Nersessian, Edward & Kopff, Richard. Textbook of Psychoanalysis. 1996. American Psychiatric Association.

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