According to Charles Strozier, “There was no one like [Heinz] Kohut who so intensely idealized psychoanalysis itself, who lived off it, who was so central to its institutional structures, and who then challenged it at such a fundamental level” (p. 143). Strozier, a professor of history at John Jay College and a training and supervising analyst at the Training and Research Institute for Self Psychology in New York, argues in this rich and authoritative biography of Kohut that “with his own protean sexuality and identity confusions, he fit uneasily into the world of psychoanalysis as Freud constructed it …, [though] for all his own confusions and contradictions, [he] may well have saved psychoanalysis from itself” (p. x). This is, appropriately, a very psychoanalytic thesis, one that Strozier, with a professional background in history and self psychology, as well as personal acquaintance with Kohut and many of his key followers, makes a strong case for.