Ch. 1: Intro – Historical Development

7. With Fairbairn, the detailed considerations of relations to objects began to be more important than the instinctual drives that energized them. 

Ch. 2: General Orientation – The Inner Life Of Man

10.  The dearth of fixed definitions of the verbal kind deters concepts from becoming frozen dogma. Freud found it necessary to repeatedly recast the meaning of even basic terms.

11. Proper selfobject experiences favor the structural cohesion and energetic vigor of the self; faulty selfobject experiences facilitate the fragmentation and emptiness of the self. 

13. Fragmentation, that is, the aspects of one’s self-experience seem no longer coordinated or fitting together.

14. The experience of these self-sustaining responses are called selfobject experiences, because they emanate from objects–people, symbols, other experiences–and they are necessary for the emergence, maintenance, and completion of my self. 

20. Understanding plus explaining add up to an interpretation.

22. In general, a deepening of the analysis as evidenced by the coming to the surface of self-awareness of previously repressed or denied material can be taken as a confirmation of the proper functioning of the interpretive process. 

Ch. 3: Basic Concepts of Self Psychology

25. In contemporary society, therefore, the shrinking importance of the family results in a gradual impoverishment of the self-sustaining aspects of the selfobject experiences that the child has. This may be one explanation for the apparently increasing morbidity of narcissistic disorders, that is, disorders of the self. 

29. Creative people frequently depend on the presence of some other person or persons–or, sometimes, some object that symbolizes the presence of the other–for the exercise of their creative skills and talents.

31. Because the discovery of the selfobject experiences out of which the self emerges seemed initially to point to two main types of selfobject experiences, that is, to the mirroring experiences and to the idealizing experiences, Kohut conceptualized the emerging self as having a bipolar structure… Thus, the emerging self structure could be thought to have two poles. 

33. Affects and appetites guide the self’s exploration of its surroundings.

42. Attempts to boost one’s self-esteem often take the form of some sort of self-stimulation; or one provokes or manipulates the environment to supply the needed selfobject experience in order to maintain some structural cohesion to one’s self. 

43. Frantic life styles, drug abuse, perversions, and delinquency all serve as desperate measures to hold on to some self-organization and avoid sliding into the fragmented state. 

Ch. 4: Selfs and Selfobjects

50. One pole of the self is constituted as a precipitate of mirroring selfobject experiences and has been designated the pole of ambitions. The other pole emerges from idealizing selfobject experiences and has been designated the pole of values and ideals. Still speaking metaphorically, a tension arc stretches between these poles because the two poles push/pull from the self in different directions. Along this tension arc are arrayed the inborn talents and acquired skills.

52. The selfobject is the function, not the person.

53. Selfobjects are neither selfs nor objects, but the subjective aspect of a function performed by a relationship. 

55. Selfobject milieu needs:

1. Mirroring needs – a need to feel affirmed, confirmed, recognized, accepted and appreciated
2. Idealizing needs – a need to experience self as being part of an admired and respected selfobjectl to be accepted by and merge into a stable, calm, nonanxious, powerful, wise, protective selfobject that possesses the qualities the subject lacks
3. Alterego needs – a need to experience an essential alikeness with the selfobject
4. Adversarial needs – a need to experience the selfobject as a benignly opposing force who continues to be supportive and responsive while allowing/encouraging one to be in active opposition and thus confirming an at least partial autonomy; experiencing assertive confrontation without the loss of self-sustaining responsiveness from selfobject
5. Merger needs: a) extension of self – primitive form of mirroring need that finds confirmation of self in the experience only of being totally one with the mirroring selfobject; b) with idealized selfobject – an intensification of idealizing need that requires being totally one with the idealized selfobject 
6. Efficacy needs – a need to experience that one has an impact on the selfobject and is able to evoke needed selfobject experiences. 

56. Even after self/object differentiation and the emergence, at least transiently, of a sense of selfhood and a structured self, there is easy and nonpathological oscillation between states of merger and states of nonmerger. At a later age, such merger states would be indicative of regression and, possibly, pathology.