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Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A
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Self Psychology as a
“postmodern” science
a b
Stephen Toulmin Ph.D.
a
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University of Chicago
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Published online: 20 Oct 2009.

To cite this article: Stephen Toulmin Ph.D. (1986): Self Psychology as a

“postmodern” science, Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A Topical Journal for Mental Health
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 Self Psychology as a "Postmodern"
Science

STEPHEN TOULMIN, Ph.D.

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N THE EARLY 1930S, THE BILLBOARDS of E n g l a n d

I carried advertisements for paint in which white-coated workmen
spelled out the brand name by painting its successive letters on the
backs of the men in front of them. This memory captures for me
one of the paradoxical features of human self-knowledge: the way
in which the different humanistic disciplines comment on one an-
other's insights, by presenting interpretations that are seemingly
contradictory, but end by proving complementary. Historians
bring to light overlooked influences of past factors on present ideas
and actions; anthropologists reveal hidden connections between
different cultural practices; political scientists underline the
unspoken interests of different social groups, psychoanalysts draw
attention to unconscious personal motives underlying public ac-
tions; and so on, and so on. Every scholar "paints" a fresh comment
onto his predecessor's view, and nobody ever has the last, authori-
tative word.
At times, there seems to be no way of breaking out of this "circle"
and arriving at interpretations that have any assurance of truth or
reliability. So, neocritical theorists of the Frankfurt School (for in-
stance, Habermas) invoke such considerations as a reason for see-
ing the received wisdom of "late capitalist" societies as being irreme-
diably distorted by unacknowledged influences and in this way

Stephen Toulmin, Ph.D., is a Member of the Committee on Social Thought, University of

Chicago.

459
 460 STEPHEN TOULMIN

exposing them to what has been called a "hermeneutics of suspi-

cion." In return, we may think that critical theorists themselves
should be more modest about the claims of their own interpretive
standpoints and submit to a complementary "hermeneutics of self-
doubt", which casts suspicion even on the validity of their own
suspicions.
These reflections are directly relevant to the present essay, which
considers the relation of recent psychoanalytic thinking —notably,
but not exclusively, the development of self psychology by Heinz
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Kohut and his colleagues—to the broader scientific world picture of

the mid- and late-twentieth century. Elsewhere, I have connected
the changes within the metapsychological theory of Freud and his
successors, from the 1890s on, to contemporary changes in the phil-
osophical argument about physics and the other "hard sciences"
(Toulmin, 1978b); and I have tried to show that light can be thrown
on psychoanalytic ideas about "unconscious motives" by consider-
ing them alongside Wittgenstein's critique of the traditional Carte-
sian philosophy of mind (Toulmin, 1981). In neither case did I
throw hermeneutic suspicion on the practice of psychoanalysis,
which makes progress only by paying resolute attention to clinical
experience. Rather, my aim was to show that the theories that are
open to psychoanalysts, as to reflective workers in any discipline,
are limited by the situation in neighboring fields of study, since
those other fields, whether scientific or humanistic, constitute the
"intellectual environment" of the discipline, and define the larger
conceptual and methodological frame within which it must work.
Nor can the issues I shall raise here about self psychology be read
as challenging the claims of Kohut's approach to psychoanalytic
practice or the clinical theories that he formulated on the basis of
his practical experience. Rather, they focus on some striking
changes in the interpretive standpoint of psychoanalysis between
1890 and 1980. These theoretical changes were possible (I argue)
only because of other, broader changes in our conception of what
Science is, and should be; and, as such, they are one aspect of a
larger twentieth-century transition, from modern to postmodern
science (Toulmin, 1983).
 SELF PSYCHOLOGY AS POSTMODERN SCIENCE 461

Nor is that change yet complete. In Kohut's final essays, we see

him feeling his way toward new theoretical positions which he never
presented in definitive form. True, his emphasis on the legitimacy
and power of the subjective method of empathy marks him off for
us as a genuinely late twentieth century thinker, and sharply differ-
entiates his ways of thinking from the neurologically based objec-
tivity of Freud's early metapsychological speculations. (In this,
Freud's debt to Helmholtz and the late nineteenth-century ener-
geticists is well known.) At other points in Kohut's essays, however,
he stands by methodological slogans from the positivist years —
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notably, those about the Wertfreiheit of Science —even where his

own practice belies them. Ironically, Kohut, who has done more
than any other recent writer to show us the relevance of psychoanal-
ysis to moral psychology, ends by disowning this connection and
decrying any tendency for "the attitude of the empirical scientist" to
be "replaced by that of the moralist" (1984, p. 77). '
The agenda for this essay is as follows. After prefactory remarks
about the concept of psychoanalytic "cure" (which provides
Kohut's title) we shall consider the methodological shift in twen-
tieth-century science, by which the Godlike role of the "modern"
scientist —a rational onlooker who observes phenomena without
influencing them —has yielded to the "postmodern" scientist's hu-
mane participation in the phenomena he has to explain. Viewed
against this background, the psychoanalytic move from a cool
detachment modeled on nineteenth-century neurology to the
empathie understanding of a phenomenologist is less mysterious. It
just takes advantage of new intellectual possibilities opened up as a
result of the changes in the general methods of the natural and hu-
man sciences that have taken place, all across the intellectual spec-
trum, since Freud was alive and working.
A historically informed reading of self psychology allows us to
reappraise the broader significance of Kohut's ideas. His theoreti-
cal innovations (we shall see) display important parallels with
Piaget's ideas about the role of "decentering" in children's cognitive

1 Unless otherwise noted, page references are to Kohut, 1984.

 462 STEPHEN TOULMIN

development, and these parallels Kohut was probably ready to wel-

come. But they are relevant, also, to central issues in philosophical
ethics, notably to the moral ideas of Immanuel Kant—who was so
influential in the Europe of Kohut's youth—about treating all hu-
man agents as "ends in themselves" and "never as means only"
(Kant, 1785). In this latter respect, I am not so sure about Kohut's
welcome. His desire to keep the sciences empirical and prevent
moral or other value preferences from influencing psychoanalytic
thinking indicate the last effects of the Vienna Circle philosophy of
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the interwar years. At this point, as in some of his formal epistemo-

logical asides, the positions presented in Kohut's latest essays are
oddly dated, and the lingering shadow of Ernst Mach lies across his
pages.

To begin with the concept of cure in psychoanalysis: here, differ-

ent readers will be preoccupied with different kinds of issues. Lay
readers may naturally ask in what sense the word cure is used when
applied to successful psychoanalytic treatment. Just because psy-
choanalysts are trained and organized along medical lines, must we
read this term in its medical sense—if, indeed, we yet fully under-
stand its medical sense (Toulmin, 1978, criticizing Szasz, 1961)?
But in this case, how can we meet the objections of critics like
Eysenck (1985) and Grünbaum (1984), who argue that any objec-
tive statistical evaluation of different methods of psychotherapy
shows that psychoanalytic procedures work no better — are no more
efficacious—than a placebo? Or do psychoanalytic "cures" have a
more priestly character, like the "cure of souls" that is the priest's
task in the Roman Catholic tradition? And if, as this second case
implies, the analyst's "healing" is spiritual not physiological, how
are we to assess its success or failure? Are claims to "salvation" the
next objects for a statistical analysis, as the current wave of mal-
practice claims against churches and religious counsellors may
suggest?2
2 Skepticism about the therapeutic purpose of psychoanalysis is not limited to hostile crit-
ics. Some practicing analysts, too, argue that the goal of analysis is less therapy than self-
knowledge, and that it is for analysands to choose whether to put their enhanced self-
command to work so as to eliminate the manipulativeness, tics, and/or other embarassing
behavior patterns that supporters of the medical model construe as "symptoms."
 SELF PSYCHOLOGY AS POSTMODERN SCIENCE 463

Interesting answers to such lay questions about psychoanalytic

cure can be pieced together from the arguments of Kohut's two
earlier books (1971,1977). Yet, despite its title, How Does Analysis
Cure?, his posthumous collection of essays adds next to nothing on
this subject; instead, it is aimed at his fellow analysts. Kohut's focus
is an attack on the familiar claim that a successful analysis leads to
increased capacity for "object love" and "autonomy." This view
(Kohut complains) falsely suggests that human beings can break
free from a preoccupation with inner selfobjects and can deal with
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the objects in the outside world independently of those distractions.

To the contrary (for Kohut) successful analysis does not help us to
"get outside ourselves," or deal with external objects freely and di-
rectly; in his view, this is just as much out of the question as was the
idea of direct acquaintance with the Ding-an-sich for Kant, and for
many of the same reasons. Instead, he invites analysts to think of
our mental lives as involving a continuing but changing relationship
with the personal selfobjects that form its permanent population.
What supporters of object relations theory might call the achieve-
ment of autonomy involves, for Kohut, not transcending our inner
experience, but reorganizing our ways of dealing with it. We never
escape from our selfobjects: instead, we come to deal with them re-
alistically, rather than in archaic ways.
Why is this way of redefining the technical criteria for "cure" of
such importance? That question can be answered on two distinct
levels, one philosophical, the other political. Philosophically, it be-
comes clearer as time goes on that Kohut approached the analysis of
experience from the standpoint of aphenomenologist. His concern
with selfobjects arises not from an empiricist assumption that men-
tal life comprises essentially private and affectively neutral "impres-
sions": the basic "sense data" of empiricist epistemology are as in-
different to all human interests as the material objects of classical
physics. Rather it springs from recognizing that the world as we
deal with it in our personal experience is made up of the objects of
our direct affective concern. In phenomenological jargon, the "ob-
jects" in the world of experience do not exist an sich, quite apart
from their roles in human activities and satisfactions : that world is a
"life world" (or Lebenswelt) whose component units are perceived,
 464 STEPHEN TOULMIN

defined, and classified in terms of their relationships to human

goals.
To speak of Kohut as adopting the standpoint of a phenomen-
ologist is not to claim that he was affiliated to a particular philo-
sophical school: we look in vain in his writings for allusions to
Husserl and Heidegger, Jaspers, or even Erwin Strauss. The actual
facts of the matter are more interesting. In all the human sciences,
the early twentieth century saw methodological moves away from
an "overobjectified" view, modeled on the physical sciences, and
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toward an alternative approach, in which the "intentional" charac-

ter of human activities was essentially involved in the definition of
the objects of study. The "intentional objects" of the human sci-
ences, so interpreted, share many features of Kohut's selfobjects:
both comprise the basic population of the "world of experience."
The major difference is that, while philosophical phenomenologists
call the experienced world the life world, Kohut refers to "inner ex-
perience," a phrase whose implications can be misleading. (As we
shall see, the point is not the internality of experience, which implies
an irrelevant solipsism, but its affective character: the phrases per-
sonal dina private experience carry the essential meaning in less dis-
tracting terms.)
On this reading, those who are afflicted by neurosis or narcissism
differ from those who are free of them, not in dealing with "fanta-
sies" rather than "real" objects, in a natural scientist's sense of the
term. The objects of affective concern are never objective in the
physicist's sense. The difference is, rather, between people who are
preoccupied by archaic selfobjects, so that their conduct is pain-
fully stereotyped, and those who share affective concerns with
other people on an equal footing —whose empathy permits their
"subjectivities" to be //jtersubjective.
It hardly needs saying that this approach to psychoanalysis goes
far beyond Freud's original, quasineurological theories; and that
distance explains the political considerations underlying Kohut's
account of the nature of cure. The goal of his argument may be
intraprofessional, but its methods are tactical and rhetorical. The
shift from a neurological to a phenomenological approach being as
 SELF PSYCHOLOGY AS POSTMODERN SCIENCE 465

drastic as it is, some might call in question Kohut's claim to belong

within the psychoanalytic tradition at all; so it is necessary for him
to emphasize both the continuities and the changes involved in this
move. By substituting "selfobjects" for the "objects" of object rela-
tions theory, and leaving the clinical methods and organizational
structures of the profession unchanged, Kohut killed two birds with
a single stone. He preserved the procedural continuity between self
psychology and its Freudian and post-Freudian forerunners, so
protecting the analysts' chief professional investment, while mak-
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ing major substantive changes in the content of clinical theory and

technique.
One can paraphrase Kohut's basic claim in terms borrowed from
Clausewitz: "Self psychology is a continuation of Freud's psycho-
analysis, but by other means." Or from Wittgenstein: "Self psychol-
ogy is the legitimate heir of the enterprise formerly known as 'psy-
choanalysis.' " For Kohut saw his position in a history of psycho-
analysis as that of an inheritor. His fundamental move from
neurological to phenomeno logical/op ons dépenser marked out an
indispensable way ahead for future analysts, who could at last pur-
sue the sources of trauma back behind the oedipal phase and so for
the first time, bring narcissism and borderline schizophrenia within
the scope of clinical psychoanalysis.

To come to my central argument: this move from a psychoana-

lytic approach rooted in Freud's neurological training to alternative
approaches of a more phenomenological kind was no isolated
change. If the view of Science current among the twentieth-century
public at large had remained what it was in 1890, this would have
obliged Kohut to abandon any claim to be a "scientist". For, by the
standards oí modern (or "classical") science, phenomenology is not
scientific but humanistic, and, in consequence, self psychology is
an essentially postmodem science.
What does the contrast between modern and postmodern imply?
This distinction marks off the ideals typical of modern natural sci-
ences, from the mid-seventeenth century up to the early twentieth
century, from the newer ones that are typical of the more novel,
 466 STEPHEN TOULMIN

postmodern branches of science, in the years since 1920, say. This

contrast embodies two main elements: (1) The classical (or modern)
scientist was required to adopt a stance of detached objectivity to-
ward the phenomena that were his subject matter: he sought to min-
imize the effect of his observations on those phenomena, so that his
results should be "real," not "observer created." (2) He also took
care to study nature in a purely "factual" manner. To this end, he
was required to avoid letting "values" and other subjective consid-
erations affect his investigations, for fear of being caught in the
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same trap as the alchemists.

In both respects, the twentieth-century expansion of Science has
led us into fields where the subject matter does not lend itself to de-
tached, value-free procedures. The intellectual posture required of
postmodern scientists is no longer that of a pure spectator. From
being rational onlookers who seek to observe natural phenomena
from a "hide," they have become participants who have to account
for processes from which their own activities can never be entirely
eliminated. So, across the entire scientific spectrum, from quantum
mechanics to ecology and psychiatry, the task of the scientist is no
longer to prevent his actions as an observer from influencing the ob-
served phenomena at all. Instead, it is to recognize the respects in
which such interactions unavoidably affect any scientific observa-
tion and to make due allowance for the consequences of those
interactions.
Meanwhile, the earlier emphasis on keeping human "values" out
of the process of scientific investigation has also faded into the
background. So long as all natural phenomena were thought of as
operations of a single cosmic clock mechanism that churned on in-
ertly without regard to human wishes, scientists understandably
theorized about them fatalistically and in terms that set all valua-
tions and preferences aside. ("Everything will happen as it in fact
happens; why then should we deceive ourselves?")
In the first, mechanistic phase of "modern" natural philosophy,
no way even existed of giving sense to the idea of physiological
"function" —let alone those of psychological "maturity" and
"health" —so the original hardline ban on value-notions began to
 SELF PSYCHOLOGY AS POSTMODERN SCIENCE 467

crumble early in the nineteenth century, with the emergence of sci-

entific physiology. However much some biochemists might protest,
it was—and still is—impossible to define the difference between
"properly functioning" and "malfunctioning" physiological sys-
tems in the purely factual terms that had been demanded earlier.
And, now that the first sharp division between natural and human
sciences has been relaxed and the behavioral sciences have been
admitted to the Scientific Academy, it is by pretending that values
can be kept out of scientific investigation that we deceive ourselves.
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Of all the fields of science, psychology is most affected by these

changes of ideal and attitude. Few people today, aside from the his-
torians of ideas, realize just how firmly the agenda of seventeenth-
century science excluded study of the human mind. For Descartes,
Newton, and Locke, the proper realm of the natural sciences (or
"natural philosophy") was material objects and physical (or "me-
chanical") interactions; within this realm, causal processes could be
explained in terms of general laws and mathematical theories. By
contrast, human thoughts and feelings which were not (like hango-
vers) mere by-products of physiological processes were explained in
quite other terms —rational rather than causal. We think and act as
we do because we have "reasons" for doing so; our thoughts and ac-
tions can be "right or wrong," "correct or mistaken," in a way the
motions of a rolling ball or an orbiting planet can never be. So,
Descartes and his successors viewed psychological issues as in-
volving a distinct realm of mental activities, not material processes;
reasons, not causes; moral or logical "rules," not mathematical and
physical "laws"—in short, Mind not Matter.
The objections to any project for a scientific study of psychology
held good up until the nineteenth century. Kant might criticize
Descartes' dualistic system for its rigid separation of Mind from
Matter; but he too continued to see "rationality" as differing funda-
mentally from "causality," on account of their distinct modes of
law-governedness {Gesetzlichkeit); and he too, accordingly, in-
sisted that psychology could never be a science. In saying this, he
was not denying that one could study mental activities systemat-
ically or methodically at all: he meant only that theories about
 468 STEPHEN TOULMIN

mental activity can never take the rigorous, mathematical form that
was familiar from (e.g.) Newton's planetary dynamics.
Not surprisingly, for as long as scientific "objectivity" was
equated with detachment from one's objects of study, it was en-
tirely impossible for human beings to study the thoughts and ac-
tions of other human beings "scientifically" (Popper, 1972). Hu-
mans do not respond well to other humans observing them detach-
edly, or from a "hide". So, today, the only psychologists who still
attempt to conform to this old style "objectivity" are a few radical
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behaviorists. (As they admit, the scope of their results is very lim-
ited [see, e.g., Holz & Azrin, 1966].) Indeed, some argue that the
very fact that research subjects take part in psychological experi-
ments knowingly, and bring all their cultural backgrounds with
them, destroys the last chance of shielding the results from "exter-
nal human influences" (Rosch, 1978). So, if psychology is now ac-
cepted as a "behavioral science," this is an indication that the terms
of entry into the Halls of Science have been renegotiated since "clas-
sical" days.
To a greater or lesser extent, all the branches of psychology are
postmodern rather than strictly classical or modern sciences. This is
preeminently true of psychoanalysis. For classical scientists, the
type example of the objective observer was the astronomer, who
studied the motions of the heavenly bodies without fear that his
own activities might affect their movements. The new, postmodern
style of objectivity is better exemplified by the psychoanalyst, who
admits that his inquiries inevitably recruit his emotions, but learns
to discount their effect on his understanding by "managing the
countertransference." Psychoanalytic inquiries can thus claim to be
scientific today only in a sense ofthat term which recognizes that in-
quiries into the deeper meaning of human experience depend on an
empathie alliance between analyst and analysand, and so involve an
unavoidable interplay between "observer" and "observed." (Does
this make it harder for us to verify psychoanalytic interpretations?
If so, it does so in ways that show the limits of positivist ideas about
"verification".)
 SELF PSYCHOLOGY AS POSTMODERN SCIENCE 469

Kohut's stress on empathy as an instrument of psychoanalytic

discovery and his determination to recapture the personal experi-
ence of emotional development in the life of the child, as distinct
from all the publicly observable changes that may interest (say) a
neurophysiologist, exemplify the first respect in which Science has
moved away from the classical methodology since the 1920s, and
mark off Kohut's theories as belonging squarely to the late twenti-
eth century, or postmodern phase in Science. (The legitimacy of
relying on empathy as a source of clinical understanding about
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depth-psychological issues may be called in question or opened up

to critical reappraisal; but we need not pursue that topic further
here.) If—but only if—we allow the scope of "science" to be en-
larged so that imaginative, empathie access to an analysand's state
of mind becomes an acceptable method of psychological research,
can Kohut's analytic methods then be regarded as "scientific."
In particular, if Newtonian astronomy and Kohutian analysis are
to be brought under the same general heading of Science, the Carte-
sian dichotomy or discontinuity between causes and reasons, Mat-
ter and Mind, material physics and immaterial psychology, will
have to be replaced by a continuous spectrum of inquiries. On this
spectrum, mechanistic studies of planetary dynamics and other in-
ert systems, which were paradigms of "natural" phenomena for
Descartes, Newton, and the seventeenth-century natural philoso-
phers stand at one extreme, analytic interpretations of human af-
fective life at the opposite extreme.
A reading of Kohut's position as postmodern in this first respect
finds a good deal of support in his posthumous essays. In a passage
we shall return to later, for instance, he says: " . . . I do not believe
we are dealing with separate biological and psychological universes,
but with two approaches to reality. When science approaches real-
ity via extrospection . . . we call it physics or biology; when it ap-
proaches it via introspection . . . we call it psychology" (p. 32).
Here, he disowns any absolute separation of the material from the
mental, or of biology from psychology, even to the extent of
making —in a rather offhand way—a concession that he might well
 470 STEPHEN TOULMIN

have avoided: ". . . the possibility cannot be dismissed that some

day even the nuances of our experiences. . . may become decipher-
able via physical data such as electromagnetic tracings of the activ-
ity of our brains" (p. 32).
While Kohut does not hesitate to reject this wing of the Cartesian
dichotomy, he recognizes less clearly that it is all of a piece with an-
other, which he still accepts: the scientific separation of facts from
values and the insistence on the value neutrality of all scientific in-
vestigation. On the contrary, Kohut is scornful of those psychoana-
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lytic writers who risk confusing those two classes of things. In re-
sponse (e.g.) to the view that ". . . the replacement of selfobjects
with self structure . . . is the essence of psychological health and
thus of the process of psychoanalytic cure," he comments that ac-
cepting this view—and so giving ". . . the yes that is compatible
with the traditional attitude of psychoanalysis —would indicate, to
my mind, that the attitude of the empirical scientist had been re-
placed by that of the moralist." His own attitude is superior to the
traditional one (he implies) because it is committed to a strictly "em-
pirical" and "factual" approach!
True, Kohut does refer in passing to the scientific importance of
"knowledge values" (p. 147), and to ". . . the procedure employed
by the psychology of the self, i.e., its positing of the reliable contin-
uousness and cohesion of the tension arc of the self as the yardstick
with which to measure health" (p. 211). Yet the belief that all values
are "posited"—i.e., arbitrary human choices imposed on a natural
world of facts—rather than discovered within a world of experience
that embraces both nature and humanity is itself one more variation
on the earlier themes of "modern" science, and so is no longer bind-
ing on us.

So long as psychoanalysts acknowledge only one of the two basic

changes from modern to postmodern science, we are poised uneas-
ily in midstream. Just as that transition takes us beyond a hardline
distinction between the "natural" and "human" sciences, so too it
lets us move beyond the earlier hardline insistence on the value neu-
trality of Science. We do full justice to our involvement in the world
 SELF PSYCHOLOGY AS POSTMODERN SCIENCE 471

of nature, as well as in the world of our shared humanity, only by

recognizing explicitly both that values have a legitimate role in
defining the key terms of newer fields of science and that morality
has an equally legitimate role in the structure of theories about hu-
man personality and interaction — not, of course, the sexually secre-
tive "old morality" that Kohut deplores in his essays, when writing
about the fin de siècle Vienna in which Freud grew up (p. 57); but a
philosophically reflective morality, nonetheless.
At this point, Kohut's account of the trajectories along which our
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emotional lives develop can be of great help to us, both factually

and in moral terms, notably, his lucid analysis of the ways in which
a child's affective involvement with other people begins as entirely
"egocentric," and only later recognizes (or fails to recognize) that
those other people too, are agents in their own right, with their own
aims, ambitions, and emotional concerns. In this respect, Kohut's
account of the emotional development of children interestingly par-
allels Piaget's (1926) account of the child's cognitive development:
to trade their two jargons, Piaget shows how the child transcends its
initial "perceptual narcissism," while Kohut shows how it succeeds
(or fails) in "decentering" its affective attitudes.
Putting Piaget and Kohut together, we obtain a view of personal-
ity development that is restricted to neither the cognitive nor the af-
fective aspect of experience. On both levels, the developing child
can be seen as faced with the same basic task: that of recognizing,
and coming to live happily with the recognition that each of us
shares the world with other human beings who view it from differ-
ent standpoints and have different hopes, feelings, and satisfac-
tions. In the end, few of us fail to decenter our perceptual worlds
and incorporate the knowledge that the objects we see and hear are
seen and heard by others from different angles or locations, from
which they may then be invisible and inaudible. But many of us find
it harder to decenter our affective lives, and continue throughout
life expecting others to have the same attitudes, goals, and ambi-
tions we have ourselves.
Emotionally speaking, the "grandiose" personality is like a child
who assumes that everyone else sees the same side of an object as he
 472 STEPHEN TOULMIN

does, while the "idealizing" personality is like one who does not rec-
ognize what is before his own eyes because he forever sees the world
from someone else's point of view. When these Kohutian points are
restated in Piagetian terminology, they awaken echoes of colloquial
idiom, and metaphors that are by now built deep into everyday
thought and speech. Clearly, we do not ask people to "try and see
things from my point of view," or to "give me your own angle on
this" only in cognitive or perceptual contexts. It is wholly natural to
use these same idioms and metaphors in talking about issues of
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emotion and ambition, action and policy, as well.

Nor is this issue of concern only to developmental psychologists.

On the contrary, if we look and see how Kohut's "yardstick with
which to measure health" works out in practical situations and de-
scribe it in less technical and more colloquial terms, it is clear that
his enterprise, too, is a moral one. (The postmodern scientist need
not apologize for this!) Professional psychoanalysts may under-
stand what it means to employ "the reliable continuousness and co-
hesion of the tension arc of the self as [a] yardstick" (p. 211) of psy-
chic health, but the lay reader neeeds to have the point put in more
accessible language. So let me draw attention, here, to a parallel,
which may or may not be coincidental, between Kohut's theory of
narcissism and the moral ideas of Immanuel Kant.
To recall, on Kohut's account, "narcissistic personalities" are of
two contrasted types: one of them pathologically grandiose, the
other pathologically idealizing. A grandiose individual does not
weigh other people's aims, satisfactions, and emotions in the same
scale as his own; he unthinkingly assumes that those others either
do —or at least should —act in ways directed by his affective preoc-
cupations, and so ends up by treating them "manipulatively." The
idealizing individual does not give his own aims, satisfactions, and
emotions the same weight that he gives those of some other, ideal-
ized person: he unthinkingly assumes that his own life either is —or
should be — directed by the supposed needs and wishes ofthat ideal-
ized other, and ends by acting "masochistically." Both personality
 SELF PSYCHOLOGY AS POSTMODERN SCIENCE 473

types are alike in one respect: they are unable to place other people
on the same footing as themselves, or treat their respective aims and
ambitions on equal terms. Instead, they either use others as a means
to their own goals or make themselves a means to the supposed
goals of the idealized other.
Turning to Kant's Grundelegung (1785), we may notice how he
states the demands of his so-called "Categorical Imperative" princi-
ple. One of his formulations rings a bell for anyone who has re-
cently read Kohut on the subject of narcissism. The nature of moral
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motives, maxims, and actions being what it is —in contrast to (say)

actions, maxims, and motives of prudence, expedience, and/or
technical efficacy—acting in a "moral" way, Kant tells us, requires
us to treat all other agents as ends in themselves, never as means
only. Later on, in a formulation that owes something to Rousseau,
he restates the demand as one that we treat all rational agents as
fellow-citizens in "the Kingdom of Ends." For Kant, viewing the
world sub specie moralitatis means seeing it as a forum for action by
agents, all of whose claims and interests are on the same footing.
Honoring thus equality in our deliberations is one basic obligation
of morality: weighing our own claims and interests, regarded as
ends, in the same scale as those of others, and treating neither other
people nor ourselves as mere means or instruments of somebody
else's satisfaction.
In Kantian terms, Kohut's account of "narcissistic personalities"
characterizes both types as unable to take up a moral point of view.
The grandiose person, in acting manipulatively, treats other peo-
ple's lives as subservient to his own and denies them equal status in
the Kingdom of rational agents; the idealizing person, in acting
masochistically, treats his own life as subservient to those of an-
other person, and so denies his own standing in that Kingdom. Es-
cape from either pathology means seeing other people, qua self-
objects, realistically—as independent agents whose interests and
life spans are on the same footing as our own. So, as a practical mat-
ter, Kohut's definition of psychic health dovetails neatly with
Kant's analysis of morality.
 474 STEPHEN TOULMIN

Why should Kohut object to being classified as a "moralist,"

along with Freud himself (Rieff, 1979) and other more relaxed psy-
choanalysts? It is hard to see why he should have gone to such
lengths to cover his trail, apart from his methodological commit-
ment to "value neutrality" and the "empirical" pursuit of "facts."
Like other intellectuals from the Vienna of the 1920s (it seems) he
never finally abandoned the positivist methods of the Wiener Kreis,
with its nostalgia for the glories of "modern" science. In his clinical
practice, Kohut's reliance on the method of empathy freed him
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from one half of this inheritance; but in his moments of theorizing

he was haunted by a residual, old-style empiricism. As a practi-
tioner, we may applaud his break with an inappropriate kind of
"objectivity," but we wait in vain for the other, theoretical, shoe to
drop.

By way of conclusion, it is worth noting some other indications

of the origins of Kohut's philosophical ideas and alliances. First, re-
call the passages we looked at earlier, in which he insists on the uni-
versality of selfobjects and rejects the idea that, in achieving true
"maturity," we transcend selfobjects and deal directly with the
world of "real objects." To a lay reader, these arguments about the
nature of "inner experience" seem to have epistemological implica-
tions: so understood, they depict the mental lives of humans, mis-
leadingly, as carried on in an entirely private, "inner" world. "The
concepts of a self and of a selfobject refer to inner experiences. . .
they are not part of physical reality but of psychological reality, ob-
servable only via introspection and empathy" (p. 50). Epistemo-
logically speaking, any such position is confronted by the threat of
Humean or Sartrean solipsism, with every individual trapped in his
own internal mental world, or Huis Clos. How does Kohut meet
this threat? Far from recoiling, he meets this objection with a "neu-
tral monism" that at first glance reads just like Ernst Mach's:

As I have stated repeatedly since 1959 . . . I do not believe we are

dealing with separate biological and psychological universes, but
with two approaches to reality. When science approaches reality
 SELF PSYCHOLOGY AS POSTMODERN SCIENCE 475

via extrospection (and vicarious extrospection), we call it physics

or biology; when it approaches it via introspection (and empa-
thy), we call it psychology.. . . Only a specific, strictly delimited
part of reality can be approached via introspection and empathy:
our own inner life and the inner life of others [p. 32].
Aside from Kohut's neologism, "extrospection," this passage
might come straight out of Mach's popular and influential book,
Die Analyse der Empfindunger (1885), which presents a similar
view of the relationship between the "physical" and the "mental"
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sciences. At first glance, again, Kohut's formulation faces just the

same problems as Mach's and makes even the possibility of empa-
thy seem miraculous. ("If all I have to go on is my own inner experi-
ences, how can I ever know anything about yours?") If, as Kohut
claims, "Our inner lives are not graspable by extrospection," what
ground do we have, in any given situation, for assuming that our
own inner experience resemble those of other people? At once,
those hoary old paradoxes loom up—"Nobody really knows what
anyone else is feeling: after all, my "inner experience" of scarlet or
anger may be just like your "inner experience" of middle C or
toothache!"
Rereading Kohut, however, one finds reason to think that his
point is clinical, not epistemological. He does not give a general ac-
count of how we recognize other people's feelings; instead, he em-
phasizes that the analyst's response to an analysand is phenomeno-
logical not observational. Rather than view the analysand from a
detached scientific standpoint —as a neurologist might do, and as
Freud himself learned to do when studying with Meynert—the ana-
lyst responds to the analysand's mental state, using all the empathie
resources of his own memory and affective sensibility; and, in this
way, he does his best to enter into the analysand's point of view,
feelings, and personal experience.
Historically speaking, there is an important difference between
the philosophical empiricism which Mach shared with David
Hume, and the position of phenomenologists from Edmund
Husserl on. The empiricists accept the radical individualism of the
 476 STEPHEN TOULMIN

seventeenth century, and assume that different human beings have

entirely separate "inner experiences" throughout their lives. Taking
this as axiomatic, they are faced with the task of showing how intel-
lectual bridges might be constructed across the existential chasm be-
tween two different people's "experiences." As a result, epistemo-
logical solipsism is a product of the assumption that different
people are inescapably cut off from each other. For phenomeno-
logists, by contrast, the separateness of different people's minds is
not axiomatic, but is an artefact of life experience. For them, the
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idea of "shared" mental lives has nothing paradoxical about it. On

the contrary, those who grow up within a culture or a family that
shares a well-defined standpoint toward the problems of life inhabit
a common "life world": their experience is "private" or "personal"
only to the extent that they make it private or personal — e.g., by re-
pression (Toulmin, 1979).
So, something is gained from seeing psychoanalysts as one kind
of "phenomenologists." The analyst responds to an analysand's ex-
perience from within a shared "life world," one feature of this
sharing being his feeling for how our emotions lead us to hide our
tender states of mind —making "private" what had formerly been
"public." That is the reason why I earlier questioned Kohut's use of
the phrase inner experience. The internality of mental states is not
the point, except in a colloquial sense, in which we keep deeper feel-
ings "hidden in our breasts." What matters is rather that these men-
tal states are kept private, so that the neurotic or narcissistic person
is unable to express them to others, or even admit them to himself.

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