Psychoanalytic theory in its purest form-the Freudian-had the seeds of later extensions within it that consisted of other theories that used psychoanalytic theory as their base but added new insights and approaches of their own. Object-relational theories, for example, were one permutation of psychoanalytic theory that was presaged by Freud 70 years before it came about. In one writing, Freud recounted an incident in which a little boy sitting in a dark room cried out for his aunt to talk to him because he was frightened. She responded that this would not help because it would still be dark, but he answered, "if anyone speaks it gets light," thus indicating that it was not the dark he feared but the absence of loved ones (Bacal & Newman, p. 3).
One such theory that grew from this historical context was Kohut's Self Psychology Theory, which is considered the foundational construct for contemporary psychoanalysis. Kohut, the major contributor to the theory, viewed the self as the personality's central core and saw the individual's personality growing out of experiences with others that had been internalized (MacFarlane, 2004, p. 337). Kohut (2009, p. 22) sees his theory as promoting a psychology that depicts the way the self becomes formed, functions, breaks up, and reintegrates. He compares its emphasis on "microrelationships with self-objects" with the emphasis that modern physics places on matter's energy and identity (Kohut, 2009, p. 31). Kohut (2009, p. xxi) felt that it was up to him to develop a psychology of the self that would fit in with the concepts prevalent in psychoanalysis as a whole, especially with respect to the complexities of mental states and psychoanalytic depth psychology. Kohut's work attracted followers such as Gedo and Goldberg (1973, as cited in Stone & Whitman, p. 3), but these emphasized particular issues related to self-psychology such as narcissism rather than baseline beliefs.
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