Self Psychology: Origins, Transformations, and Clinical Life

Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies

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At the center of Kohut's revolution was a deceptively simple claim: that the self, not drives, is the proper subject of psychoanalytic inquiry. Steeped in the classical tradition, he dared to move human relationship to the center of development, psychopathology, and cure. It was a quiet revolution whose reverberations continue to shape contemporary psychoanalytic thought.

This course traces that revolution from its origins in classical and ego psychology, through Kohut's foundational contributions: empathy as clinical method, selfobject transferences, optimal frustration, rupture and repair, transmuting internalization followed by post-Kohutian perspectives that have extended and transformed self psychology's inheritance. Throughout, clinical application remains central: not technique alone, but a theory of what human beings need from one another, in development and in the consulting room.