Abstract
The author overviews David Tuckett’s substantial and innovative approach to examining psychoanalysis which sheds new light on the suppositions that underlie and organize analysts’ understanding of analytic process and reviews his application of that methodology to Kohut’s work. The author will suggest that while Tuckett’s methodology of unearthing the implicit suppositions that analysts bring to their clinical work and data are profoundly illuminating, this work itself is organized by his own supposition that the core of psychoanalysis is the discovery and uncovering of an extant unconscious structure that he terms “X.” Leaning on Neville Symington, the author illustrates how Tuckett’s suppositions and consequent conclusions regarding Kohut’s innovation of Self Psychology—and much contemporary psychoanalysis—is based on a conflation of the primary with the secondary and manifests an attachment to classical psychoanalysis rather than being in relation to it. The author illustrates how many contemporary psychoanalysts are concerned with a wider range of phenomena than the revelation of the underlying template or “X” and will conclude that Kohut’s contributions have advanced psychoanalysis rather than undermining it.