You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I had a dream. In it I was flying through the air, soaring really, and feeling wonderful. In front of me was a man in a gray suit with lovely and intricate wings like those of a fly greatly magnified. It was Kohut. We flew along joyfully until we came to a bridge. To avoid hitting it, he went into a dive and passed just underneath the structure itself. I followed him but somehow got off course and crashed into the water. He came to my rescue. The dream got vague and ended. I had this dream six weeks after the publication of my book (Strozier, 2001) and the night of the rave New York Times review on Sunday, June 3, 2002. Not long after I learned the book had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. I would say the dream suggests I am flying, if a bit precariously, in Kohut's wake. I am a mighty bird, buoyed but behind him, Icarus unmasked. The dream raises the question: Who are we psychologically who write biographies of really creative people?
It is not always the case that biographers personally know their subjects. I did know Heinz Kohut. I am a scion of an old University of Chicago family, and Kohut knew my family rather well. He was friendly with my French professor father but was especially close with the man who later became my stepfather, Ho well Wright, chairman of pediatrics at the University in the 1940s when Kohut was a rising young neurologist. When I first met Kohut at his 60th birthday party in 1973 (I was 29), he was cordial and very warm in his greeting. Later, when I was a candidate in the Institute for Psychoanalysis after 1976 and at the start of my academic career as a history professor at a branch of the University of Illinois, he heard me present some of my early work on Lincoln (1982). He seemed impressed and drew me into the outer edges of his circle. He and I (and two others) were on a panel about self psychology and the humanities at the first self psychology conference in 1978. We even collaborated on a book together (Kohut, 1985), which involv