Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst [Hardcover]

Charles Strozier (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2001

Heinz Kohut (1913-1981) was at the center of the twentieth-century psychoanalytic movement. After fleeing his native Vienna when the Nazis took power there, he came to Chicago, where he spent the rest of his life. He became the most creative figure in the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and is now remembered as the founder of "self psychology," whose emphasis on empathy sought to make Freudian psychoanalysis more compassionate.

Kohut's was a life that invited complexity. He obfuscated his identity as a Jew, negotiated a protean sexuality, and could be surprisingly secretive about his health and other matters. In this biography, Charles B. Strozier shows us Kohut as a paradigmatic figure in American intellectual life: a charismatic man whose ideas embodied the hope and confusions of a still unsettled country. Inherent in his life and formulated in his work were the core issues of modem America. He touched the pulse.

The years after World War II were the halcyon days of American psychoanalysis, which thrived as one analyst after another expanded upon Freud's insights. The gradual erosion of the discipline's humanism, however, began to trouble clinicians and patients alike. Heinz Kohut took the lead in the creation of the first authentically home-grown psychoanalytic movement. It took an émigré to be so distinctly American.

Strozier brings to his telling of Kohut's life all the tools of a skillful analyst: intelligence, erudition, empathy, contrary insight, and a willingness to look far below the surface.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Developments in psychoanalysis are, appropriately, often the products of half-discovered impulses and longings, so it's fitting that Kohut's The Analysis of the Self, which essentially invented and delineated relational psychoanalysis, was the product of many conflicting influences. This new, definitive biography not only records Kohut's illustrious career, but gives fresh insights and reflections upon his work. Born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Vienna in 1913, Kohut grew up with an intrusive mother, had an affair with his male tutor when he was 12, structured his sexual life around masochistic fantasies and studied to be a physician until he fled Austria in 1939 and moved to the U.S. Here, he became well known as a psychiatrist, and then as a psychoanalyst, reaching full bloom in 1971 with the publication of The Analysis of the Self. Strozier (Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America) has produced a sympathetic narrative of Kohut's life and work, but avoids the pitfalls of hagiography. He addresses Kohut's sexual ambivalence (including a close, lifelong friendship with conductor Robert Wadsworth) and his tormented relationship with his Jewishness, which ran so deep that Kohut was known to cause scenes in kosher restaurants by insisting on being served a ham sandwich and a glass of milk. Strozier navigates this complicated material with skill and sensitivity, never reducing his complex subject to a case study, in a work that will appeal to a small but dedicated audience.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Historian and psychoanalyst Strozier (Lincoln's Quest for Union) knew Chicago analyst Heinz Kohut (1913-81) at the end of his life and is carrying on his work. One of the most important American analysts, Kohut became the leader of a less authoritarian and more compassionate school of psychoanalysis known as self-psychology, now a major force in humanizing Freudian theory and practice. The author recounts the gripping, moving, and instructive story of this driven, creative, cultured intellectual, who was much respected as a teacher and therapist but disliked for his arrogance. Healing, music, courage, religion, art, charisma, rage, and death are some of the topics covered in this splendid biography. Too important to leave to professionals, this accessible work is highly recommended for all libraries.DE. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; 1st edition (May 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374168806
• ISBN-13: 978-0374168803
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #918,939 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a deep drink from an unusual well., August 21, 2001

By 

Rebecca Brown "rebeccasreads" (Clallam Bay, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Hardcover)

A biography of Heinz Kohut who was at the center of the 20th century American psychoanalytic movement. After the Nazis took over Vienna he fled to Chicago, where he spent the rest of his life & is now remembered as the founder of "self psychology."

That said: you have got to have an appetite for exploration into the deep recesses of our psychology & the ways we live our lives.

This biography will appeal to those who have lived through the same era as Heinz Kohut & who have encountered the less authoritarian & more compassionate school of psychoanalysis now known as self-psychology which made major changes in reformatting the revered Freudian theory & practice.

A deep drink from an unusual well - well-written, if somewhat dense in places. Well worth it, however, if you are at all interested in the signs of intelligent life during America's post WWII years which led up to the human potential movement.

I'm amazed that I read it because my mind was boggled by the subject & the author! What did I learn? Zounds - it'll take me years to process a fraction of what has been brought to the surface!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 180 N. Michigan Avenue redux, May 23, 2007

By 

fefl "fefl" (Miami, Florida USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Paperback)

For those who knew in vivo many of the characters forming the cast of this epic, reading the book would have an illusory experience of deja vu.

Kohut and many of the members of the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago had the courage to launch a new system that shook the freudian orthodoxy in its very foundations --- while in so doing managing to enrich this, until then, fading system.

I highly recommend this biography as a fair and just assessment of the man (and of the men and women that formed his inner circle) and of his grasp on narcissim and empathy.

Kudos to Strozier!

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Kohut and Judaism, August 26, 2009

By 

M. Mulberg - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Paperback)

As an analyst, can one espouse a therapeutic modality (self-psychology) if the founder is an individual clearly in conflict and denial, as Kohut was, vis-a-vis his Judaism? My answer is no! Even though he was elected president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the widespread opinion was that he suffered a narcissitic personality disorder. His narcissistic rage was clearly most evident in his projecting of total hatred onto anything remotely connected with his Jewishness. Two of the most telling incidents in Strozier's book is when Kohut went to lunch in a kosher delicatessen with Paul Ornstein, one of his disciples(with a rabbinic background), whose analyst wife is an Auschwitz survivor. Kohut purposely ordered a ham and cheese sandwich with a glass of milk, which had the effect of humiliating not only the waiter, but both Ornsteins. Is this an individual whose philosophy one wants to follow? It was reported in Martin Bergmann and Milton Jucovy's book "Generations of the Holocaust" that Kohut's treatment of his patient, Mr. A, who had to flee the Nazis in Germany, only focussed on the patient's structural deficit. Kohut saw no connection between the child being a Holocaust survivor and his psychopathology. Is this characteristic of the empathy so widely touted as being practiced by "self-psychology"? Otherwise, Strozier's biography is interesting, although it gets bogged down in theoretical dogma, and could have used some tighter editing of chapters.