Customer Reviews

Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst

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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!

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!

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.