ABSTRACT
In the first two chapters of this book, I showed that Kohut viewed narcis sistic personality disorders as nonresponsive to the conventional interpre tations of conflict and defense derived from drive theory and ego psychology. He discovered that patients with these disorders, when cor rectly understood, nevertheless formed stable and recognizable transfer ences, which permitted psychoanalytic treatment to proceed without a need for technical modifications. Kohut originally identified two basic transfer ence patterns of mirroring and idealization, which represented the bipolar self, and first referred to these as narcissistic transferences. His original emphasis on narcissistic pathology and narcissistic transferences evolved into a broad concept of the self and the self’s requirements for responsive ness, the self-selfobject environment. Thus, he came to see mirroring and idealization (and later, twinship) as selfobject functions that sustain and invigorate self-esteem. The mobilization of these functions in treatment takes the form of a selfobject transference.
