Journeys and Generations: Tending the Professional Self

Abstract

In this personal reflection piece, the author reprises her Kohut Memorial Lecture given in Jerusalem in 2014. Elaborating the premise that becoming a competent practitioner requires both didactic and experiential means of learning about self psychology, she describes the path to becoming a self psychologist through reading, meetings, mentors, and personal therapy. Her experiences of transformative moments in each of these arenas are described and the reader is encouraged to reflect on analogous experiences in his or her own professional development. The author emphasizes the importance of cross-fertilization across generations by encouraging younger clinicians to reach out to more senior people and more experienced clinicians to actively help nurture and develop the next generation of self psychologists. Vehicles for doing so are described.