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Kohut's correspondence spans the period from his preadolescence in early-twentieth-century Vienna until two months prior to his death in October 1981. Interestingly, the first letter published was to his father, the last to his son Tom. The concept “curve of life” was Kohut's. The letters provide an historical perspective on our understanding of both the man and the corpus of his work.
Those interested in the lives of the Central European psychoanalytic pioneers who escaped the Holocaust and found on American soil the opportunity to freely exercise and develop their intellectual talents and contributions will find in Kohut's correspondence an extraordinarily rich experience. Kohut never actually met or knew Freud, even though their destinies converged with the events related to the Anschluss. In a letter to Peter Neubauer dated July 12, 1968, he describes the poignant moment seeing Freud leave Vienna by train in June 1938: “When Freud left Vienna, Aichhorn (Kohut's analyst) told me about it and, apart from a friend who accompanied me, I was to my knowledge the only person to see Freud off. When the train started to move I took off my hat and Freud tipped his traveling cap to me” (pp. 208-209). Kohut was at the time a twenty-five-year-old medical student who would himself escape to England eight months later.
In his introduction, Geoffrey Cocks asserts that Kohut's famous case study, “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z,” in fact represents Kohut's two analyses. The first was his training analysis in the 1940s with Ruth Eissler; the second was his self-analysis in the 1960s. Cocks points out that although Kohut never told anyone that he was Mr. Z, both his wife and his son are convinced this was the case. The reader of both the Mr. Z case study and Kohut's correspondence is therefore provided an unparalleled opportunity to engage deeply with the inner life of one of