By selfobject Kohut (1971, 1984) means the experience of another – more precisely, the experience of impersonal functions provided by another – as part of the self.
Selfobject transference, therefore, is the patient's experience of the analyst as an extension or continuation of the self, that is, as fulfilling certain vital functions that had been insufficiently available in childhood to be adequately transformed into reliable self structure.
He came to discover that within the empathic treatmenteatment milieu unmet infantile needs for recognition, idealization, and twinship reemerge in the form of mirroring, idealizing, and twinship selfobject transferences.
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