Critique ofThe Psychology of the Self:A Casebook

The book,Psychology of The Self (1978), and the movement of thePsychology of the Self are criticized as having degenerated into a kind of cult that basically rejects all former and contemporary psychoanalytic contributions. The end product is that many patients are incorrectly diagnosed as narcissistic character disorders and then treated by the same method, emphasizing the patient's need for an empathic self-object. Even the cures reported seem to put the patient in a schizoid and narcissistic position in which object relations that involve real attachments to another person are minimized. Instead of changing people from narcissistic to object-related, the reverse appears to occur. The Psychology of the Self: A Casebook was written with the collaboration of Heinz Kohut, M.D., edited by Arnold Goldberg, M.D.