Heinz Kohut and the Psychology of the Self by Allen M. Siegel

Author:Allen M. Siegel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134883929
Publisher: Routledge

A self psychological view of anxiety, dreams and aggression

Kohut demonstrates the explanatory power of his psychology by examining the mental phenomena of anxiety, dreams and aggression. He compares the anxiety experienced in the structural neuroses with the anxiety experienced by a weakened self. The self in a structural neurosis is intact and the anxiety, which usually presents as a vague dread, becomes increasingly clear and specific as one works with the resistances. The anxiety deepens because the castration fears that previously were defended against are now revealed and experienced.

In disorders of the self, anxiety tends to present differently. Here the anxiety is due to a preconscious concern about the fragile nature of the self. It often begins with specific concerns about wholeness and safety, reflected, for example, in a worry that a skin infection might lead to septicemia, that an insignificant lump might be cancer or that a crack in the foundation of a home might lead to its eventual collapse. The anxiety is focused and specific rather than vague or diffuse. These are concrete attempts to define the vague, broader concern about the disintegrating self. As treatment progresses, these circumscribed hypochondriacal fears generally give way to a recognition of the diffuse anxiety connected to the threatened disruption of the self. Kohut argues that mental apparatus psychology lacks a satisfactory explanation of this anxiety whereas a psychology of the self brings this understanding to psychoanalysis.

Dreams are another phenomenon Kohut uses in his argument to demonstrate the usefulness of self psychology. He describes two categories of dreams. The first is dreams in the structural neuroses. Such dreams express drive-wishes, conflicts and attempts at conflict resolutions. By following the patient’s associations the analyst undoes the camouflaging dream work and uncovers the unconscious wish that stimulated the formation of the dream.

The second group of dreams contains imagery that expresses the vague tensions associated with traumatic states. In dreams of this type, the patient’s associations do not lead to an uncovering of the deeper, defended layers of the unconscious, as they do with dreams of the first group. Instead, associations tend to stay at the level of manifest content and provide imagery of the disintegration that threatens the self. Kohut calls these ‘self-state’ dreams and likens them to the dreams of the traumatic neuroses.

As an example of the latter group of dreams, a young woman about to make a major life change was leaving a city where she had deep attachments. She reported a series of dreams in which she kept losing her luggage as she traveled to her new home. Whenever she felt relief at finding one piece, she suddenly lost another. Try as she might, it was impossible for her to gather and retain all her belongings in one safe place at the same time. Associations were to thoughts about moving and feeling disrupted. They did not deepen to reveal an unconscious drive-related wish. The meaning of the dream is contained in its manifest content, which symbolically expresses the state of her dislocated and temporarily fractured self.

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