Kohut’s selfobject and the Jungian interpretation of myth, meaning and the Self
Author: Christopher Chayban
In this paper, I will be discussing Heinz Kohut’s self psychology and it’s contribution to depth psychology and Jungian Thought. We will focus Kohut’s theory of the mirroring selfobject and its relationship to the Jungian interpretation of myth, meaning and the Self.
To start, self-psychology is an elaboration of an earlier theory called “object relations.” This movement started with Melanie Klein and Anna Freud and continued through D.W. Winnicott who were concerned with the person’s internal experience of an external object (a person, place or thing.) The term used for this experience is called “intrapsychic.” Kohut seems to have been partial to Winnicott’s idea of the “transitional-object” calling his idea of the self-object at times as the “transitional self-object” (The Analysis of the Self pg.25). This transitional selfobject carries the parental imago, which a Jungian would term as “Father or Mother” archetype. A transitional object for a child would be something like a teddy bear or a blanket that helped to securely separate from merger and identity with the mother as it developed its own sense of self. The self-object however, is more organic, as in a real living person with emotion and possibility for empathic libido (psychic energy) that could fill or deprive the child of regulatory internal structures to cope with anxiety. The mother is really the first mirror for the child and plays a big role in the male psyche, as it the first contact with the archetype of the “Anima” who “mirrors,” and “mediates” the unconscious, so that he may become more conscious of himself. The selfobject takes on this mediatory role.
Like the transitional object, the selfobject is a carrier of our projections, which in infancy are highly grandiose (inflated, archetypal) and narcissistic (ego-oriented). For Kohut, narcissism is not pathological but rather, It is part of a developmental line that’s built up to what he called “the nuclear cohesive self,” (The Analysis of the Self pg.11) or what Jungians would call an “ego complex” with “nuclear” referring to that aspect of the ego being “the center of consciousness.” For Kohut, the ego or what he calls the “self” is the organizing factor in psychic life (Individuation & Narcissism pg.65), but for Jung, it is the “Self.” The usage of the same word with two different meanings is unfortunate and therefore, the “Kohutian self” is often kept lower case, and the “Jungian Self” is often capitalized.
In Kohut’s system, how well your selfobjects are able to “mirror” or reflect conscious empathy back to you, your grandiosity (archetypal energy), determines the degree of you being able to handle difficulties, disappointments, or anything else that is charged with intense emotional energy, without you falling apart or “fragmenting.” In Jungian psychology, the ego, as a complex (which is a set of ideas held together by an emotion) is vulnerable to be taken over by these intense energies or “complexes,” which have an archetypal core and therefore grandiosity potential. They force the ego or “cohesive self” to split or fragment into pieces. which can lead to psychoses, unfulfilled desires, loneliness, depression, emptiness, and meaninglessness.
The job of the selfobject is to help build up or restore cohesion or wholeness to the vulnerable ego because it is the carrier of the Jungian “Self,” the Archetype of wholeness or unity. Failures in an empathic response by a selfobject or the environment leaves an individual’s ego complex loose and vulnerable to outside influence and destruction and the selfobject can bring order and organization to those damaged structures or holes in the psyche.
This is why it is not so surprising to see mandala images of the square and the circle together, or an image of order in dreams, whenever one is on the verge of fragmentation in consciousness. The dream, “compensates” what is happening in consciousness in order to keep what Kohut calls “narcissistic homeostasis” (The Analysis of the Self pg.28), except for him, it is not the unconscious image, but the empathic response of the conscious selfobject. This is the difference between Kohut and Jung, which is the sphere of psychic activity, is wider for Jung and extends to not only (inter)personal, but also a deeper collective unconscious of the inner cosmos where one is involved in a “cosmic narcissism” of the “unknowable” Self (Individuation & Narcissism pg.75-76).
This brings us to myth, which is a kind of language for the unconscious. The issue of narcissism and the need for mirroring is related to the myth of Narcissus (Individuation & Narcissism pg.8), who is described much like the narcissistic character disorders today with uncontrolled rage, delusions of grandeur (The Analysis of the Self pg.8) and condescending towards those loved ones. Narcissus dies when he finally sees his face in a pool of water (a mirror), which is to say that narcissistic behavior goes through a solutio or dissolution whenever it is mirrored properly.
Dr.Lionel Corbett further pushes the alchemical themes and says that the Jungian Self or the Kohutian selfobject brings about the experience of the Alchemical Coniunctio or the “Union of the Opposites” (The Religious Function of the Psyche pg.25). Of course, it is at first an unconscious Coniunctio with the mother, which needs a separatio (splitting of opposites done by the failures in empathy and consciousness) only to return to the coniunctio on a conscious level (successful mirror attempts) and individuation through relationship to the world.
These successes are brought about by the transference, which for Kohut comes in three forms. The first transference is called the “Idealization transference” where the parental imago (parent archetype) is activated through interaction with the therapist and the need to admire something greater than itself. The second is the called the “Mirror Transference,” where the Grandiose or Jungian Self is activated when the patient is looking for admiration due to the empathic failures in its environment. The third is the counter-transference, which is the result of the therapist’s reactions to one of the previous two transferences, which mobilizes or de-mobilizes the grandiose or Jungian Self (The Analysis of the Self pg.28) based what the patient needs. I.e. it brings the patient back in touch with archetypal energy (without becoming inflated and a narcissistic personality disorder) if the patient is depressed or brings them down from archetypal energy if they need an idealized relation to the Self. Both are to bring more cohesion to the ego, and create a wider container for the archetypal energy to “incarnate” more successfully.
According to Dr.Corbett, this is how the grandiose or Jungian Self, brings about the Alchemical Coniunctio, with it, meaning and order that “incarnates” into the psyche. The therapist’s mirror response is essential to building a strong enough container to hold the affect or overwhelming energy of the archetype (The Religious Function of the Psyche pg.28). For Corbett, incarnation of the “Spirit,” which he says is synonymous with archetype (because it orders the psyche), is embodied by the affect or emotion in the body. This affect is transmitted by the complex, which is originally caused by the empathic failures by our selfobjects. The “Soul” or “Psyche” translates this energy into a healing image like for instance in through the vehicle of the dream (The Religious Function of the Psyche pg.149). The selfobject takes on a new spiritual dimension that is responsible for healing and for our joy (The Religious Function of the Psyche pg.149), or the capacity for religious experience or the spiritual bliss the that Hindu and Buddhist’s call “Ananda.”
The selfobject mirrors back to us our unconscious to create more consciousness. Consciousness is done by reflection, which Jung says the purpose is so that “the creator can become conscious of his creation and for man to become conscious of himself “(MDR pg.338). This brings meaning to the “Created Self” which is otherwise in a universe that is only a mechanistic and a “meaningless machine” (Individuation & Narcissism pg.108). This also, further establishes the “ego-self” axis between Kohut’s self and Jung’s Self, As what we call “God” shares similar attributes with the unconscious, with the main quality being that it is the “unknown that wants to become known,” and it is known through the mirror reflection of consciousness.
So to conclude, our misery and joy are both created by the failures and successes of empathy. We can only feel joy (which in itself is meaningful and divine-like when experienced) if we are secure. Bowlby’s attachment theory showed that secure children were able to return and play with their toys. And so too, for us, we depend on our selfobjects to make us feel secure, so that we can engage in more play, rather than anxiety to which both, are a result of our experience of myth and meaning.
Resources:
Corbett, L. (2001). The religious function of the psyche. Hove, East Sussex: Brunner-Routledge.
Jacoby, M. (2017). Individuation and narcissism: The psychology of the self in Jung and Kohut. London: Routledge.
Jung, C. G., & Jaffé, A. (2013). Memories, dreams, reflections. United States: Stellar Classics.
Kohut, H., & Wolf, E. S. (1978). The Disorders of the Self and their Treatment : An Outline. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis,59, 413-425. Retrieved from http://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/kohut1978.pdf
Kohut, H. (2013). The Analysis of the Self A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rabstejnek, Carl. (2015). A Brief Review of Self Psychology.
Leave a Reply