Response to Commentaries by Coburn, Gardner and Teicholz on "The Emerging Paradigm of Relational Self Psychology: An Historical Perspective".

We express our deep appreciation to our three commentators, William Coburn, Jill Gardner, and Judy Teicholz, recognizing the value we gained by each of them reading our paper closely and respectfully, and responding accordingly. We begin with William Coburn, who saw our efforts as the latest move in the evolution of the complex system we call Self Psychology. We feel he appreciated our account of how Self Psychology has developed and changed both within Kohut's lifetime and since his death, moving from a one-person to a two-person psychology, in part in response to interaction with infant research, Intersubjectivity theory, and other relational theories. We then move to Jill Gardner, who raises questions about just how differently we view the nature of the self and transference and asks if there are predetermined aspects of each that are not relationally co-created in the analysis. Finally, we turn to Judy Teicholz, for whom Kohut has always been a relational Self Psychologist. We feel this is an ahistorical view that fails to enter into the classical one-person psychology milieu in which Kohut was trained and initially worked, and obscures the significant changes in Self Psychology that emerged both in his lifetime and through the efforts of subsequent theorists. All in all, we are grateful for the time and effort all three of our commentators devoted to what we wrote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]