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Heinz Kohut (; May 3, 1913 – October 8, 1981) was an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst best known for his development of self psychology, an influential school of thought within psychodynamics/psychoanalysis theory which helped transform the modern practice of analytic and dynamic treatment approaches.
Kohut was not enrolled in school until the fifth grade. Before that he was taught by several tutors, a series of "Fräuleins and mademoiselles". Special care was taken that he learn French language. From 1924 on he attended the Döblinger Gymnasium in Grinzing, or the 19th District, where the Kohuts built a house. During his time at the school he had one, then he had been isolated from his peers by his mother. At school, a special emphasis was given to the Greek language and Latin languages and Greek literature and Roman literature. Kohut also came to appreciate Goethe, Thomas Mann and Robert Musil.
In 1929, Kohut spent two months in Saint-Quay-Portrieux in Brittany in order to study French. At school he wrote his thesis on Euripides' play The Cyclops. His Latin teacher, who had antisemitism sentiments and later participated in the Austrian Nazi movement, accused him of plagiarism. The thesis was accepted after Kohut's father intervened.
Kohut entered the medical faculty of the University of Vienna in 1932. His studies took six years, during which time he spent six months in internships in Paris, first at the Hôtel-Dieu, and then at the Hôpital Saint-Louis. The latter hospital specialized in the treatment of syphilis, which subjected Kohut to shocking experiences. In Paris, he became acquainted with Jacques Palaci, a Jewish medical student from Istanbul, and paid a visit to him in 1936. The following year, Kohut's father died of leukemia. Sometime after this, Kohut entered psychotherapy with Walter Marseilles, who seems not to have been competent at his profession. Early in 1938, Kohut began psychoanalysis with August Aichhorn, a close friend of Sigmund Freud.
After Austria was Anschluss to Germany by Adolf Hitler on March 12, 1938, the new regime presented difficulties for Kohut, as he still had to take his final exams at the medical faculty. He was eventually allowed to take them after all the Jewish professors had been removed from the university. The Nazis then effectively confiscated all property owned by Jews. The property was sold for much less than its market value, and much of the rest was taken by the state in taxes. Kohut eventually left Austria, landing first in a refugee camp in Kent, England. Many of his relatives who stayed behind were killed in the Holocaust.
In February 1940, Kohut was allowed to travel in a British convoy to Boston, from where he travelled to Chicago by bus. A friend from Vienna, Siegmund Levarie, who had emigrated to live with an uncle in Chicago and who would subsequently become a famous Musicology in the United States, arranged a visa for him and invited him to join him there. Kohut's mother Else also emigrated to Chicago, traveling via Italy. With the money she had smuggled out of Austria, she opened a shop called "De Elsie's".
Kohut was unhappy with neurology, and it seems he was bored in this field. Too much of his time was spent in the laboratory, and there was not enough contact with human emotion.
In 1944 Kohut decided to leave neurology and move into psychiatry, and in 1947 he was appointed associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago. He got his certification psychiatry in 1949.
In the fall of 1946 he had already been accepted to the Chicago Institute and began immediately on its courses. In the summer of 1947, he was given his first two "control" cases, followed by a third and a fourth case in early 1948. He began to receive patients on a permanent basis in 1949. In October 1950 he took his exams, passed them and became officially an analyst. He became a training and supervising analyst as well as a member of the institute's staff in 1953.
Unlike Franz Alexander, who had sought to shorten analyses, Kohut took as long as it took for the patients to get well in analysis. The agenda came entirely from the patient, whose job it was to say whatever occurred to him or her. He said to one of his patients: "I will do what I can to help you try and understand yourself."
He received his patients at the institute. All his patients are said to have adored him, although in the beginning of his career he had one case with which he failed miserably. Also, during the early years of his career as an analyst, his success was mixed.
Kohut analyzed several people, who were already analysts but who felt they had not benefited as much from their didactic analyses as they had hoped. Some did their training analyses with him. These individuals included Peter Barglow, Michael Franz Basch, George Klumpner and Paul Tolpin.
He later gave the course over to Philip Seitz, who had been auditing the course and had made notes of it that he had discussed with Kohut and then amended those notes in accordance of those discussions. This collaboration resulted in a joint article, entitled "Concepts and Theories of Psychoanalysis: Relation of Method and Theory" (1963). Seitz published his notes more than three decades later in the form of a book.
Kohut's teaching style is said to have been brilliant, but at the same time it eclipsed the minds of the listeners, and according to Paul Ornstein who took the course, the style was pedagogically a failure. Other commentators have also said that Kohut's brilliance made his students passive and did not encourage independent thinking.
Kohut felt that analysts should be scientists and not technicians who just applied a set of rules to their work. He believed that if the latter were to be the case, the whole field of psychoanalysis would be assimilated to dynamic psychiatry and disappear forever.
The last of these positions meant an incredible amount of work, preparing all kinds of meetings and working in a number of committees, as well as putting out all kinds of bush fires within the association. There was, for example, a question of whether analysts should or could express publicly their views about the mental health of Barry Goldwater.
Kohut was at the time very much a representative of traditional Freudian analysis, and he was very careful not to do anything that could have been interpreted as a departure from traditional views. He was also careful about "his reputation as the chosen one to provide leadership for the next generation of psychoanalysts." Much later he jokingly said that in the 1950s and early 1960s he was "Mr. Psychoanalysis."
During this time Kohut became acquainted with everyone who mattered in psychoanalysis worldwide. For Kohut, the most important of these figures was Anna Freud. He first met her in 1964 in a meeting in Princeton. After that they were constantly writing to each other.
In the fall of 1966, the University of Chicago gave Anna Freud an honorary doctoral degree. Kohut may have been among the people who initiated this idea, and when she came to Chicago for this event, she stayed with the Kohuts in their apartment. Various activities were arranged for her in Chicago, and for Kohut this visit was a great success.
In the long run Kohut began to feel that his work as the president drained his energies and kept him from developing his own ideas. He was also beginning to have ambivalent feelings about classical analysis. In addition, this position exposed him to people who were self-centered, full of themselves and narcissistic in the worst sense of the word. There was nothing wrong in the science of psychoanalysis, he felt, but the problem was in the people "who are carrying on their work on the basis of these ideas." One could say that this was his higher education in matters related to narcissism.
After leaving his position of the president of The American, Kohut was in 1965 elected vice-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). In 1968 he was encouraged by Anna Freud and the Eisslers to run for the presidency of this world-wide organization, as in 1969 it was the Americans' turn to have their representative elected. In the end it turned out that the European members of IPA were beginning to favour Leo Rangell, and thus Kohut would not stand a chance in the election. Anna Freud advised him not offer himself for a defeat, and Kohut withdrew from the race. He then explained this situation to his colleagues by saying that the presidency would have interfered with his creative work, which was a self-invented myth that many colleagues duly bought. Had Kohut been elected, it would have been likely that his first monograph, The Analysis of the Self would have remained his only main contribution to psychoanalytic theory.
This theme actually relates to the very foundation of psychoanalysis, the ability of one human being potentially to gain access to the psychological states of another human being. Interestingly, Sigmund Freud only mentioned this phenomenon in passing in a footnote in one of his articles ("A path leads from identification by way of imitation to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to take up any attitude towards the life of another soul." Kohut now took up the matter and gave a very thorough presentation on this subject, outlining what kind of subject matter can be approached with empathy and what cannot be approached with it. Essentially it means that empathy as a method defines the field that can be observed with its aid.
The basic thesis is that those phenomena that can be approached by means of empathy are called psychological (i.e. relate to the inner life of man), and those that cannot be approached with it, are non-psychological, i.e. physical phenomena and must be approached with our sensory equipment. The approach thus is Epistemology.
Despite the warm reception of this paper in Chicago, it was initially turned down by the editors of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, on the grounds that it presented too basic a challenge to psychoanalytic theory and thus not appropriately psychoanalytic. After an intervention by Max Gitelson, who argued that the journal should not engage itself in ideological censorship, the editorial board reconsidered the paper and eventually published it in 1959.
With regard to using a psychoanalytic approach to works of art and to the lives of artists, Kohut lists three problems:
According to Kohut, this three-part self can only develop when the needs of one's "self states", including one's sense of worth and well-being, are met in relationships with others. In contrast to traditional psychoanalysis, which focuses on drives (instinctual motivations of sex and aggression), internal conflicts, and fantasies, self psychology thus placed a great deal of emphasis on the vicissitudes of relationships.
Kohut demonstrated his interest in how we develop our "sense of self" using narcissism as a model. If a person is narcissistic, it will allow him to suppress feelings of low self-esteem. By talking highly of himself, the person can eliminate his sense of worthlessness.
Goldberg eventually emerged as the central figure of the group, whereas Paul Ornstein would become the editor of Kohut's collected works. Basch was the most original thinker of the group, but he chose to remain on its fringes.
The group met originally in Kohut's apartment in order to discuss his manuscript of what would become The Analysis of the Self. There were nine such meetings during the spring and early summer of 1969. The manuscript was considered to be difficult by the group, and the comments convinced Kohut that he had to write a new beginning to this book, which then became its first chapter, entitled "Introductory Considerations." In reality this may actually have made the book even more difficult to digest than what it had been prior to the writing of this new first chapter.
As his starting point, Kohut takes the conceptual separation of the self (German das Selbst) from the ego (German das Ich), which was done by Heinz Hartmann. Whereas the id, ego and super-ego are members of the psychic apparatus and thus agencies of the mind, the self is not an agency but still a content and a structure within the psychic apparatus.Kohut 1971, s. xiii–xv.
The self contains two part structures, the grandiose self and the omnipotent object. These are structures that are found in the development of all human individuals, the healthy as well as the disturbed. They have their own developmental line, which according to Kohut (at the time) was separate from the developmental line of object love. With the narcissistically disturbed people, this development has been thwarted, and the narcissistic structures have been repressed, and thus the narcissistic energies involved with them are not in the disposal of the subject. This results in low self-esteem and many diffuse symptoms, including possible .Kohut 1971, s. 9.
In the course of an analysis, these structures become activated and the patient is able to transform them. With some, the grandiose self will be dominant, resulting in what is called a mirror transference, and the patient expects to receive admiration from the analyst. With others, the omnipotent object is dominant, and in this case the patient directs an idealizing transference toward the analyst.Kohut 1971, s. 37–101.
In a normal childhood as well as in analysis, these (re)activated structures enter the process of transmuting internalization, and what follows is that the grandiose self will turn into a set of ambitions and the omnipotent object into a set of ideals.Kohut 1971, s. 28, 175.
The various other parties, such as the psychoanalyst, will be called selfobjects, because they are experienced as part of the self.Kohut 1971, s. xiv. Though dynamic theory tends to place emphasis on childhood development, Kohut believed that the need for such selfobject relationships does not end at childhood but continues throughout all stages of a person's life.Elson, Miriam. (1986). Self Psychology in Clinical Social Work
Kohut presented his theory as a parallel to the drive theory and the theory of the Oedipus complex. The idea was to present a theory of a type of patients whose psychological disturbance preceded the emergence of the Oedipus complex. It had traditionally been considered that these patients were too disturbed to be treated psychoanalytically. With Kohut's theory, the psychoanalytical treatment could now be extended to these patients as well.
In 1973, a banquet was arranged for Kohut's 60th birthday, which turned into a conference on self psychology. Among the participants were such people as Alexander Mitscherlich from Frankfurt, Paul Parin from Zürich and Jacques Palaci from Paris, as well as many psychoanalysts from the United States, including e.g. René Spitz from Denver. The distinguished historian of Vienna, Carl Schorske from Princeton was a featured speaker. The high point was a banquet, with John Gedo as the speaker. Kohut himself would respond to Gedo's speech by delivering a speech which he had spent months preparing and which he had memorized and presented as a spontaneous response to Gedo. It was later published with the title "The Future of Psychoanalysis."Strozier 2001, p. 239.
In Strozier's view, Kohut's illness forced him to think for himself and resulted in several breakthroughs in his career as a theorist of psychoanalysis. He came to the conclusion that many analysts had been shaming their analysands in the guise of offering interpretations, that neurotic pathology was only a cover for narcissistic problems, that idealization was not a form of defense, that everyone needs mirroring, and that rage is a byproduct of the disintegration of the self. He broke free from classical metapsychology and formed his own, general psychology, with the self as its center. This would be self-psychology in its broad sense. The approaching death forced Kohut to think with his own brains. He knew that he was shaking psychoanalysis in its core, and he was afraid he would not have the time to finish his revolutionary job. By and large he stopped reading psychoanalytic literature, saying either that others say things better than him or that they write things that are no good. He devoted his time to his own writing, to listening to music and reading about the arts.Strozier 2001, pp. 240–241, 243.
The article was possibly a miscalculation, because he ought to have written on this topic in one of his monographs, which were more widely read than his articles. Due to this fact, criticism was leveled at him, saying that his views on aggression and rage were inadequate and naive and superficial at best.Strozier 2001, p. 249.
For Freud, rage was a biological given that one needed to learn to curb. For him, wars, intolerance and repression were caused by a regression to a more primitive psychological level of the drives, from which our egos are separated only by a thin layer of civilization. For Kohut, neither the history nor the human soul could be explained by such reductionistic formulae. For him, rage was a byproduct of the disintegration of the self. For him, the rage one feels is in no proportion to the slight that has caused it. A person filled with rage does not feel any empathy towards the person or persons that have caused the slight.
According to Kohut,Kohut 1972, p. 635.
Mature aggression, however, is goal oriented and limited in scope. Rage, on the other hand, consists of a desperate need for revenge, an unforgiving fury for righting a wrong, when one's self has disintegrated due to an experienced slight.Strozier 2001, p. 250.
Kohut published another important article in 1976, entitled "Creativeness, Charisma, Group Psychology. Reflections on the Self-Analysis of Freud". He starts by making some comments on the psychoanalytic community, and then moves to Freud's self-analysis and his relationship with Wilhelm Fließ, but in the end he writes about charismatic and messianic personalities. His examples of these are Adolf Hitler and Churchill.Kohut 1976, pp. 793–843.
The key concept in this article is the group self, which he puts forward in a tentative manner, as a "potentially fruitful concept".
Charismatic and messianic personalities evolve from childhood situations, in which the child has been given empathy at first, but then the mirroring and idealized figures have caused them "abrupt and unpredictable frustrations". In result, the child has taken upon himself to perform the tasks of the selfobjects, developing a superempathy towards himself, while feeling next to no empathy and plenty of fury towards the outside world. He has begun to live in a decidedly archaic world filled with rage at the torment he suffered from his early selfobjects. He feels perfect himself, and asserts his perfection with self-righteousness, and demands control over others who would then serve as vicarious regulators of self-esteem. These people have special capabilities for sensitivity,Strozier 2001, p. 255.Kohut 1976, p. 834.
In 1973, Kohut assembled again the group of his younger followers, inactive since 1969, to write what would be published as the so-called Casebook, officially The Psychology of the Self: A Casebook. Invited were John Gedo, Arnold Goldberg, Michael Franz Basch, Paul Ornstein and Anna Ornstein, Paul Tolpin and Marian Tolpin, Ernest Wolf, David Marcus and Meyer Gunther. However, Gedo soon left the group.
The idea was that Kohut's disciples were to write case histories of analyses which Kohut had supervised, and that Kohut would supply the book with his comments. The book was edited by Arnold Goldberg, but John Gedo left the group in 1974, and Kohut himself soon left the project as well, although it is said on the cover that it was "written with the collaboration of Heinz Kohut".Strozier 2001, pp. 272–274. Kohut then assembled a smaller group which would meet in private homes. People from outside Chicago were also invited. This group would in 1978 evolve into annual conferences on self-psychology.Strozier 2001, pp. 276–277.
Kohut started to write this book in Carmel, California, during his summer vacation in 1974. By February 1975, he had written ca. "three quarters" of it, and by June he said it was soon to be completed. Its working title was a rather awful one, The Rehabilitation of the Self: Thoughts About the Termination of Analyses and the Concept of Cure. After the summer of 1975, he would say that the book was already finished. By October 1975, he had arrived at the final title, The Restoration of the Self. However, he carried on working on this book for the next year, and during this time he abandoned the awkward subtitle. The book was published in the spring of 1977, and it was an immediate success: by June it had sold 11.500 copies.Strozier 2001, s. 278.
The Restoration of the Self is the best-written and most accessible book by Kohut. He tried as best he could to avoid the language of the drive theory as well as psychoanalytic metapsychology, which made his first book, The Analysis of the Self, such a difficult read. Kohut had decided to make his new book more accessible, and he worked together with Natalie Altman, his publisher's editor, who would read and comment on his text. This work proceeded throughout the year 1976.Strozier 2001, s. 279.
Restoration turned out to be Kohut's breakthrough, the work in which he steps up from behind the curtain. He had abandoned the drive theory and its language, and he was never again to return to the mainstream Freudian psychoanalysis. Nearly all principles of psychoanalytic technique, inherited from Freud, were now in the line of fire: the drive theory, the central role of infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex, the close relationship between conflicts, defenses and resistances, and working through. Kohut makes a clear break from Freudian thinking.Strozier 2001, s. 281–282.
Kohut says that The Restoration of the Self "is not a technical or theoretical monograph written detachedly by an author who has achieved mastery in a stable and established field of knowledge". On the contrary, "it is a report of an analyst's attempt to struggle toward greater clarity in an area that, despite years of conscientious effort, he was unable to understand within the available psychoanalytic framework." He says he is "floundering in a morass of conflicting, poorly based, and often vague theoretical speculation," and that the only way forward was to go "back to the direct observation of clinical phenomena and the construction of new formulations that would accommodate my observations." He says he had tried to integrate his thoughts with those of previous thinkers, but thisKohut 1977, s. xx–xxi.Strozier 2001, pp. 282–283.
Kohut bypasses most authors in the field of psychoanalysis, but not Freud. He is in constant dialogue with him, and often finds himself contradicting him: Freud is no longer a relevant thinker from the point of view of history, or conceptually, therapeutically of philosophically.
Kohut writes about the Tragic Man (his view of man) and the Guilty Man (Freud's view of man), and Freud seems almost to suffocate Kohut. He struggles to breathe, and the "only salvation is that the struggle to breathe forces Kohut to clarify his ideas in ways that changed the field forever."Strozier 2001, s. 283.
For Freud the essence of psychoanalysis was that "neurotic misery would be transformed into common unhappiness", and the unconscious would have to become conscious, repression barriers would have to be overcome, and light would have to penetrate the cauldron of desires, and the truth would have to be seen face to face, no matter what would follow from it. For Freud, Kohut's idea that the psyche could be transformed into something new was "completely alien and exceedingly naïve."Strozier 2001, s. 283–284.
"In Freud's early work with hysteria, Kohut argues, he probably cured mostly through suggestion and the mighty force of his belief in the rightness of his views," writes Strozier.
Healing was not Freud's point.
"Freud's values were not primarily health values", Kohut wrote. However, in Kohut's view, "it is to Freud's eternal credit that he created depth psychology."Strozier 2001, s. 284.
Kohut wanted to fundamentally question Freudian drive theory, and he understood that at the same time he would have to question the goals of Freudian analysts: "the mastering of infantile drives through more adaptive sublimations, making unconscious material conscious, and expanding and liberating the realm of the ego." Very few of Kohut's contemporaries understood that these goals originated from the drive theory. Challenging this paradigm was equal to an attack at the core of psychoanalysis.Strozier 2001, s. 288.
"Mr. X." had originally been a case history by Anita Eckstaedt, a German analyst. Mr. X. was a German student of theology analyzed by Eckstaedt, but Kohut had disguised him as a young American man, who had wanted to join the Peace Corps but had been turned down. He had supposedly been analyzed in the US by Kohut's younger colleague in supervision with him.
When the German edition of Restoration ( Die Heilung des Selbst) was in preparation, Eckstaedt wrote to Kohut with two demands: (1) the case needed to be disguised further, and (2) Eckstaedt wanted to have more credit for the case. These demands were clearly mutually exclusive, resulting in a dilemma, which Kohut solved by writing up the case of Mr. Z., which replaced the case of Mr. X. in the German edition, which came out in 1979. Kohut later published the case in English in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, carefully edited by Natalie Altman.Strozier 2001, p. 309.
Mr. Z. is presented as a patient that Kohut had analyzed twice for four years, first within a Freudian framework, and after an interval of five years, within Kohut's new framework of self psychology. Both analyses lasted for five years.Strozier 2001, p. 311.
Kohut did not discuss the case of Mr. Z. with his wife Elizabeth or his son Thomas, and he did not read out the article to them, something which he usually did with all his works. Elizabeth and Thomas did not really read the article until after Kohut's death.
The important facts of the life of Mr. Z., which coincide with Kohut's life, are the following: He was an only child, his mother had similar character traits to Else Kohut, including her interest in painting and poetry. His father was away for a few years, before the son was five years of age, the story of a skiing vacation and the hotel there is similar to Kohut's own life. The novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was read to him at an early age. There is a camp counselor that resembles a tutor that Kohut had had at an early age. The parents were distant with each other. However, some details are slightly changed. The father of Mr. Z. sits in with a small band and sings with them, when in reality Felix Kohut was an accomplished pianist.Strozier 2001, pp. 310–311.
There is no conclusive answer to whether Kohut was Mr. Z., but Strozier makes a strong case for it,Strozier 2001, pp. 310–316. as does Cocks.Cocks 1994, p. 20. Strozier says that with such a prominent case for self psychology, it would have been highly likely that Kohut would not have used it until 1977, when he had already written two books on his theory.
Thomas Kohut studied at the University of Chicago Lab School and eventually went through psychoanalytic training, but then decided to make a career as a historian and a psychohistorian.
Although Kohut enjoyed holiday trips to Europe, often in connection with psychoanalytic events, his favorite place for holidays was the town of Carmel in California. Beginning in 1951, the Kohuts usually spent two months there, from mid-July to mid-September. This way he could escape the hot and humid summers of Chicago, which caused him various problems due to his allergies. They always rented the same house, which was owned by an English couple that wanted to spend the summers in their native country. This house in Carmel is where Kohut did most of his writing.
In addition to the holidays in Carmel, the Kohuts also had a country house in Wisconsin, where they could spend weekends, often during the winter.
Kohut was psychologically unable to visit his native Vienna until 1957. He then visited his maternal uncle Hans Lampl, who had got back his old position as an executive of the Leykam-Josefsthal A.G. paper company. Lampl treated the Kohuts to a dinner, and used his position of influence to give a special gift to his nephew's son.
Kohut's mother Else also lived in Chicago, not far from Kohut's apartment. In the 1950s and 1960s she visited the Kohut family regularly for dinners and major holidays. She is said to have been the only person who could really get under Kohut's skin. Apparently no one in the family liked her. She would be pushy and aggressive, speak directly at other people's faces and poke people with her finger.
After 1965, when Else was getting close to 75 years of age, she began to "demonstrate a set of circumscribed Paranoia ." This, together with her declining health, made it necessary for Kohut to place his mother in a nursing home in 1970. For Kohut, the fact that his mother had turned out to be crazy, was a liberating experience. He now realized that his whole life had been spent trying to escape from his latently psychotic mother. He could now also understand why his father had been absent in his childhood. Strozier argues that Else's craziness liberated Kohut's creativity and made it possible for him to study the deeper meanings of highly regressed states and thus to write his first and most important monograph, The Analysis of the Self. Else Kohut died in late 1972.
In the United States, he was viewed as a modern liberal, and he was for state control of gun ownership. He considered the Vietnam War to be immoral and stupid, yet he did not initially understand his son's anti-war attitude. Thomas Kohut was at the time studying at Oberlin College, which had a long history in opposing all kinds of social injustice, beginning with opposition to slavery and being an important station in the Underground Railroad. Eventually, Kohut came to see reason in his son's views, and their anti-Richard Nixon sentiments presumably gave them some common ground.
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