Kohut Memorial Lecture Honoree:
Paul Ornstein

Kate Schechter

For me, the highlight of Paul Ornstein's Kohut Memorial Lecture was his whimsical, moving "late night hypnagogic fantasy" conversation with Kohut, where those in attendance got to participate—up close and personally—in the very selfobject transference that Ornstein delineated in the body of his talk. Paul Ornstein's gift to his audience was a delightful encounter with the founder of self psychology that centered on the question so many of us have struggled with over the last 25 years: Is there no definition of psychoanalysis that could unite our divergent trends while also leaving room for future generations to transform and modify psychoanalysis from within? With a friendly admonishment to Ornstein and others who have glossed over it, Heinz Kohut reminded his colleague and former supervisee of the epilogue of The Restoration of the Self, where he laid down a broad definition of psychoanalysis—expressly excluding specific (i.e. historically specific) concepts—that left it open for ongoing change. In its essence, Ornstein-Kohut told us, psychoanalysis is the dyadic encounter of two people for the reflexive exploration of the inner life of one of them. The different trends that we see in psychoanalysis today stem from "the variety of ways the data of this experience are organized, understood, and interpreted." Kohut's methodological legacy, the experience-near reformulation that constituted psychoanalysis as a science sui generis, thus authorizes clinical process on post-positivist grounds as a science open to ongoing development.

Emphasizing the selfobject transference, Ornstein briefly surveyed those of Kohut's contributions that set psychoanalysis on the "road of continual transformation" we've seen over the last 25 years: empathy and experience-near theorizing on the one hand, and, on the other, the basic concepts of self psychology—self, selfobject, selfobject transference, fragmentation (and, Ornstein adds, transmuting internalization). In the spirit of his Talmudic motto ("each generation should have its own interpreters, its own teachers"), Ornstein proceeded to give us his own subjective appraisal of Kohut's work and legacy in order to think through what our generation has done with this legacy to make it our own and, in doing so, to encourage our efforts to move beyond our current theoretical fragmentation and develop a culture of critique, connection, and expansion within self psychology. Hearing this, one felt that Dr. Ornstein was relinquishing the symbolic grip of the first generation of Kohut's students on his legacy, doing the work of mourning that might allow the rest of us to move on in developing this line of psychoanalytic work. But what, exactly, is this legacy? And what have we done with it? I summarize.

Empathy—our mode of observation, the "final common pathway for all varieties of affective-cognitive channels"—defines the domain of psychoanalysis. While the mode of observation in any science determines its data, by adding that it is the meaning of this data that is open to change, Kohut incisively set his method on an open course for discovery (and then for transformation, modification, and development) while at the same time offering a unifying definition of the field on epistemic grounds. Thus empathy, "inextricably intertwined" with self psychology, systematically grounds the empirical level of Kohut's legacy. As Ornstein said, Kohut profoundly believed that "the analyst cannot claim to having understood the patient unless the patient felt understood." Ornstein is reminding us that Kohut's acute sensitivity to history and culture allowed him to see that empathy was the emergent that Freud grabbed onto at the beginning of psychoanalysis with his concepts of transference and countertransference. Human subjectivity emerged as an object of scientific contemplation in late modernity out of "that basic level of man's relationship to reality where we cannot yet differentiate data from theory, where external discovery and internal shift in attitude are still one and the same, where the primary unit between observer and observed is still unobstructed and unobscured by secondary abstracting reflection."

A review of the basic concepts of self psychology (self, selfobject, selfobject transference, and fragmentation; Ornstein also adds transmuting internalization) followed, and it was here that Ornstein's reading of contemporary self psychology came into clearest view. Ornstein focused on the selfobject transference, the indispensable gravitational center of Kohut's contribution, delineating a number of reasons for its indispensability: (1) it captures early, determinate, specific developmental experiences, providing a continuation of early reality, widening the spectrum of analytically treatable psychopathology, and mobilizing and opening to view "what the patient's very personal agenda is—and not what the analyst may think should be dealt with;" (2) it expresses Kohut's fundamental view of the human condition that there is no complete autonomy at the end of the developmental line; (3) it grounds his key ontological claim, that cohesiveness and vigor of the self motivate development; (4) it demonstrates that not only are faulty structures revealed in the selfobject transference, but also "tendrils of hope" to repair the deficit by reaching out to the analyst for the necessary, previously denied responsiveness; and (5) it guides us to the unfulfilled developmental needs that emerge with varying degrees of awareness and that allow the patient to feel him/herself part of the analyst, to feel the analyst part of him/herself, or to feel the analyst to be like him/herself.

It is this selfobject transference that Ornstein regrets has, over time, been omitted from explicit clinical discussion. To assess the several branches that have grown out of Kohut's work Ornstein set about to seek out the empirical data the newer intersubjective and relational theories seemed to be drawing on in order to see if his own theory allowed him to account for these. Here some examples and references to specific works would have been helpful, and I hope that when Paul publishes his talk he will add these. For both theories he outlined a broader and a narrower definition, and in both cases he found significant overlap of his self psychology with the broader definitions and difficulty reconciling the narrower ones with what he called "the empirically grounded selfobject transferences." Intersubjectivity, for instance, in its broad meaning—any two people ineluctably impact one another—finds a home in any psychoanalytic theory. Its more specific meaning, though, is not transportable across theoretical branches, as it rests on premises that are incommensurate with the idea of selfobject transference in assuming that even in early life there are two "whole" subjectivities involved with each other; this assumption, in neglecting the ways that in selfobject transferences patients experience the analyst as part of their self (or experience themselves as part of the analyst or as like the analyst) denatures the selfobject transference by diminishing its status to "one subclass of emotional organizing principles." In Ornstein's reading, intersubjectivity, in its specific meaning, can therefore neither illuminate nor facilitate the emergence of reactivated archaic needs in treatment, even while it does give us an updated language that is "more clearly expressive of psychoanalysis as a pure psychology." Next Ornstein spoke of relational analysis, differentiating a specific from a general meaning of "relational" in order to draw attention to Kohut's (and his own) concern, exemplified in several stories of supervision with Kohut, that what is focally important is not the relationship per se, but, specifically, how the patient is experiencing the analyst, what the analyst is needed for functionally. "What we do and say matters less than what the patient makes of it." The analyst's spontaneous, compassionate participation should be a given; participation is the everpresent background of selfobject responsiveness.

Ornstein completed his brief survey with a sparkling imaginary conversation with Kohut. Those who were not present at the plenary will be pleased to know that in this conversation Ornstein not only secured Heinz Kohut's availability to continue talking to us into the future, but also received some elaboration on one of the most ticklish issues that has been with us since Kohut's last talked a quarter of a century ago, whether empathy per se has a curative impact. Did you really mean that? asked Ornstein.

Kohut: "Well, yes and no . . . besides being an avenue to the inner world, empathy also has many other meanings for the patient . . . it is already a response to unexpressed craving for appreciation and validation at the core of his/her beingÑhence it contributes to the therapeutic impact. But I also concluded that ordinary, everyday empathy . . . is the 'emotional glue' that makes living together possible in the face of disruptive social forces."

Empathy may have a curative effect, depending on its meanings for the particular patient; this is an empirical question, not a theoretical one. Perhaps such a pragmatic reframing can help us with our persistent misunderstanding of the special place of understanding in our theorizing, and here I borrow from Arnold Goldberg as well as William James, Edward Sapir, and other pragmatic wholists. As Ornstein says (in Kohut's voice), a fundamental change in paradigm—as opposed to a development within an established direction—will require that our method of observation and a new understanding be combined. We have tended to dissect and place empathy now on the side of mode of observation, now on the side of curative factor, divvying up the whole and moving away from the live configuration never to return it to its original practico-theoretical fullness. This tendency to parameterize, foreign to Kohut's emphasis on wholes and their dynamics, may stand in the way of a fuller unfolding of the potential of his contribution since it lends itself instead to specialization and fragmentation of our field (into relationists, intersubjectivists, etc.).

The take home message for me was a reminder that Kohut always anticipated changes to come—both developments and modifications within the line of thinking he developed and paradigm changes that might make even such universally applicable experience-distant concepts as transference and resistance irrelevant. His work was a good beginning, "establishing a direction for further progress in psychoanalysis—at least for awhile." But now, Ornstein and Kohut both nudge us, "the time is ripe to look at these ideas with critical scrutiny and compare and contrast them with newer developments."

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