A number of core concepts of self psychology can be taught with very vivid examples from everyday experiences and current affairs.

Selfobject—
I ask students to consider how they feel when their computer breaks. A well-functioning self object is experienced similarly—something experienced as other but almost part of oneself. You are utterly dependent on it for smooth functioning, but don’t think about it til it breaks. Everyone needs effective self objects in their lives, although as we grow and mature they become more varied and flexible in nature. Kohut described the loss or absence of selfobjects as like an astronaut on a spacewalk whose tether to the mother ship is severed.

Mirror selfobject transference or relationship
I use the image of “the gleam in the mother’s eye” and give Arnold Goldberg credit for this phrase. If you’re a kid and you come home from school and your mother gives you a big hello and a smile, and seems delighted to see you, that’s successful mirroring. An abundance of these experience and you develop as a confident whole self. If you come home from school and she says “your hair looks awful—did it look like that all day?”, that’s a failure in mirror functioning. The child “fragments” and fails to develop an integrated solid sense of herself.

Idealizing selfobject transference or relationship
Arnold Goldberg again provided the core image—a father lifts his child up onto his shoulders. The child feels one with the father’s height, confidence and strength. He is allowed to share in the father’s world, and see’s his father as very powerful and omnipotent.

Narcissistic injury and narcissistic rage
Interruption of smooth selfobject functioning is experienced as a “narcissistic injury”. Rage, often rather intense, is the predictable consequence of narcissitic injury.

I tell the story of the comedian Richard Pryor, who allegedly came downstairs to discover that his car wouldn’t start and he shot it with his gun. His car, as a self object, had no right not to start. It was meant to function seamlessly for him, and its failure led to a rupture in the self-selfobject bond, Pryor’s narcissistic rage, and the absurd but understandable shooting.
 Prudence Gourguechon, M.D.
 Chair, APsaA's Task Force on Psychaonalysis and Undergraduate Education

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Kohuts’ books are very hard to read. His early papers on narcissism are the most easily understood and evocative. Dr. Gourguechon recommends:

1966: Forms and Transformations of Narcissism. Journal of the American Pyschoanalytic Association. Vol 14. pp 243-272.

1972: Thoughts on Narcissim and Narcissistic Rage. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Vol 27. pp 360-400.

1978: with Ernest Wolf. The Disorders of the Self and Their Treatment. International Journal of psychoanalysis. Vol 59. pp 413-425.