Self psychology is a school of psychoanalytic theory and therapy created by Heinz Kohut and developed in the US at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. 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.

Kohut came to psychoanalysis by way of neurology and psychiatry in the 1940s. Subsequently ‘In a burst of creativity that began in the mid-1960s…Kohut found his voice and explored narcissism in new ways that led to what he ended up calling a “psychology of the self”.’ Thus the publication of ‘his book The Analysis of the Self [1971]…was what Kuhn would call a new paradigm.’

Kohut maintained that parents’ failures to empathize with their children and the responses of their children to these failures were ‘at the root of almost all psychopathology.’

Kohut argued that what made therapy work, was more about the patient, than the analytical theories.

To make therapy work, one needed to address the patient’s self.



Self Psychology – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [ONLINE] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_psychology. [Accessed 19 February 2011].

YouTube – Heinz Kohut Self Psychology 4 / 6 . [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkSCrYuK53Y. [Accessed 19 February 2011].