By the way, I thought of something else that I should have mentioned.
One big difference between ego psychology (ie mid-20thc Freudian analysis-type psychology) and Objection relations theory, on the one hand, and self psychology, on the other, is a move by Kohut away from socalled "drive theory" to a theory of the development of a self distinct from the drives.
Most more doctrinaire Freudians focused on repression or mal-formation in the drives (primarily sex and aggression) as the causes of neurosis, and as what needed to be made conscious, and then properly reorganized, or channelled in a more positive or constructive way, for analytic progress to occur. This is also true of Object Relations, although object relations had a very different analysis about how the drives evolved and were shaped, which incorporated a relation of some sort of other Objects (ie people or parts of people).
Kohut, on the other hand, diverged from this view, by focussing on the development of the self through identifcation with and acceptable frustration by idealized others (or semi-others) and mirroring, ie that the self became understood, and developed through the internalizations and projections of itself, and the adequate mirroring or frustration of its own grandiosity by the other, or self/other.
But drive theory was something he was very concerned with separating himself from, thus the importance of distinguishing Self Psychology from Object Relations Psychology--
Vautrin
|