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Heinz Kohut died on October 7, 1981 after an extraordinary career. Having been the President of the American Psychoanalytic Association and an admired teacher and leader within classical psychoanalysis, he then became the inventor of self psychology and the revered and excoriated leader of this new movement within psychoanalysis that claimed to raise psychoanalytic theory and technique to a new conceptual level: psychoanalysis would no longer be confined to "guilty man," but would be able to encompass the hugeness of "tragic man" as a creative being in an endless universe. He was a charismatic teacher and a mesmerizing speaker. The often acrimonious debate aroused by his work sparked a reexamination of many basic propositions. For example, while Kohut was sharply criticized for advocating cure by kindness and empathy, his critique of standard analysis led us to a careful and often creative reassessment of our concepts of neutrality, the analytic setting, the sources of transference responses, and the focus on intrapsychic experience. Also, his different ideas about the origins of neurosis became part of a renewed debate on the centrality of the Oedipus complex, the role of the "real" environment of development, and the availability of preoedipal experience in the transference.
The book under review was completed shortly before his death and edited posthumously. It is clear that Kohut had multiple agendas for this book. He addresses not only the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis, but he also attempts to redress errors and misunderstandings about self psychology that had arisen both among his followers and his repudiators. Kohut is at pains throughout the volume to make clear that self psychology is a powerful, even revolutionary, new theory of psychoanalysis, while at the same time he gives an unexpected (at least to this reviewer) and unalloyed allegiance to the core of psychoanalytic theory and technique as developed by Freud.