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Although a complete exposition of self psychology is beyond the scope of this article, I shall attempt to discuss aspects of the theory and therapeutic methodology in considering each of the points I make.

Although Freud's concept of the superego certainly stressed the importance of internalized (usually introjected) moral precepts and ideals in human functioning, Kohut made the presence of firm, coherent, mature ideals part of the basic strength or resiliency of the individual. These ideals are part of the idealizing pole of the bipolar self. Significantly, he does not specify which values he thinks people should have-that, he believed, was up to the individual. He did believe, however, that these values and ideals are important ingredients in a cohesive, resilient self, as important as the individual's ambitions, which are part of the other pole of the self. For example, one client of mine, a handsome, charming, intelli­gent man, was a successful lawyer. He worked in an area of law that he saw, however, as meaningless, and his view of the worth of his work made it impossible for him to feel proud of his success. His lack of firm values and ideals also made it impossible for him to d...

If Kohut merely mirrored many of the ideas and beliefs of existential-humanism, there would be little advantage to his the­ory. However, I believe there are many advantages to self psychol­ogy, advantages that originally stimulated me to attempt to inte­grate self psychology with Gestalt therapy (Tobin, 1982).

All too often one gets the impression from reading Kohut that his theoretical and philosophical ideas sprang spontaneously from his own mind and were not based on the ideas of others. For example, Winnicott's concept of the "subjective object" is very similar to Kohut's concept of the "selfobject," but Kohut makes no mention of Winnicott as a contributor to his own theories. Recognizing this, he attempts to explain this neglect as due to his aim, at least in his 1977 book, The Restoration of the Self, of "an attempt to struggle toward greater clarity" rather than "scholarly completeness" (Kohut, 1977, p. xx). Similarly, Rogers has made extremely impor­tant contributions to the use of empathy in therapy and, although Kohut earlier defined empathy differently from Rogers in his last article (Kohut, 1982), he seemed to be taking an identical position (Chessick, 1985), yet there is no mention of Rogers. Rollo May (1958) 30 years ago gave a profound description of the compartmentaliza­ti...

In this article I have attempted to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of orthodox psychoanalysis and existential-humanistic psychology, to show how psychoanalytic self psychology incorpo­rates many of the strengths of each while avoiding many of the weaknesses, and to give some flavor of the philosophical assump­tions that underlie self psychology. I have also made an attempt to point to some lacks in self psychology that I believe existential­ humanistic psychology could rectify. I tried to integrate some of the theoretical concepts with the philosophical assumptions, but, be­ cause of the limited scope of the article, was unable to bring in more than some of the very basic concepts, such as the self, the selfobject, empathy, and optimal responsiveness. I want to emphasize that I have discussed these concepts in a very cursory way. There are also a number of other important theoretical and practical aspects of self psychology that I did not even mention: the concept of trans­ mu...