Conference of the MidEast, Europe and South Africa

Paper Abstract:

The Spiritual Core of Kohut’s Legacy

For a generation now, the future development of psychoanalysis has been awaiting a proper absorption of the spiritual dimension into the fabric of meta-theory and therapeutic practice. This paper proposes self psychology as a paradigm capable of making a unique contribution to the study of the spiritual dimension in human psyche. The feasibility of a spiritual psychoanalytic thinking originated in the conceptual passage from the Guilty man and the Tragic man to the Mystic man, and it springs from the shift from a psychoanalysis based on an orientation of separateness towards a psychoanalysis anchored in unified worldview of `Oneness`. Three crucial contributions make self psychology a pioneering pathfinder in systematic theorization of the spiritual in psychoanalysis: A. the ‘self’ as flow-concept between the experience of structured psyche and the being of unstructured spirit; B. the Absolute and the individual’s ability to reside in it via the contextual web of selfobject matrix; C. the transformation of a human’s evolution from emergence into individual existence, to the human’s dissolving into transcendent being of supra-individual existence of participation in the world. 

This essay is an edited lecture of a paper that will be published during 2022 in Psychoanalytic Inquiry.