Book Notice

Releasing the Self:
The Healing Legacy of Heinz Kohut


by Phil Mollon

WHURR PUBLISHERS LTD.
Published by Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group)
SBN 186156 229 2  Paperback/pp240 Price £22.50
 

Phil Mollon, Psychoanalyst (British psychoAnalytical Society) and
Psychotherapist (Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists)



In the ten years before his death in 1982, the American psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut presented a body of highly original clinical observations and theorising, creating a new conceptual lens - ‘self-psychology’ - revealing aspects of mental life that had hitherto remained largely obscure. These remarkable insights have made possible psychoanalytic understanding and treatment of those whose sense of self and psychic equilibrium might otherwise have proved too fragile. However, Phil Mollon argues that Kohut’s views have been widely - almost scandalously - misunderstood. For example, Kohut has been misperceived as advocating gratificatory mirroring of the patient rather than analytic understanding. In fact, Kohut remained essentially loyal to the deep roots of Freudian psychoanalysis and its technical reliance on interpretation. His innovations lay in the content of psychoanalytic interpretation. With the aim of drawing out the true meanings and implications of self-psychology, Mollon examines in detail Kohut’s own clinical illustrations. In addition, he explores the interaction between Kohut’s work and other contemporary psychoanalytic points of view, as well as making links with emerging perspectives in developmental psychology and neurobiology. He shows that Kohut implicitly formulates a psychoanalytic process in which the limits of understanding are acknowledged and seen as crucial in allowing the continuously evolving unknown self to be released.


CONTENTS
1 Rage, shame and presymbolic dread
2 Discerning invisible structures,
3 Perversion, the vertical split and the psychoeconomic dimension
4 The healing process in Kohut’s psychoanalysis
5 Empathy and the intersubjectivists
6 Kohut and the internal object
7 Impasse and Oedipus
8 Schizophrenia and depression: The fragmented self and the thwarted self
9 The developmental neurobiology of the selfobject relationship
10 Self psychology perspectives on childhood trauma
11 Further reflections on psychoanalytic cure
Appendix. Notes on Kohut the man


WHURR PUBLISHING FOR PROFESSIONALS

 

The books in this series can be ordered from Karnac Books Ltd