LARB | Z Kratochvíl
The shift away from desire as the locus of clinical attention began almost a century ago in the 1930s, when Freud was still alive. At that time, the object relations school moved away from drive theory and toward theories of attachment, shifting the understanding of human needs from aliveness to security. Several decades later, Heinz Kohut’s “self psychology,” and his influential 1971 book The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders, went even further. Emerging alongside the language of self-esteem, self psychology organized treatment around mirroring and recognition, focusing not on what the patient wants but on how she feels about herself.