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The New World of Self makes the extravagant claim following the argument of philosopher John Riker that Heinz Kohut is the most important psychoanalyst since Freud. The authors argue that many clinicians, among them Jung, Erik Erikson, Winnicott, and Fairbairn, saw the need for new more humane, connected, and related forms of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, but Kohut was alone in providing a coherent theory to undergird the transformations that were taking place in clinical practice.
The creation of The New World of Self compellingly reflects its message. It was written by Charles Strozier, Kohut's celebrated biographer, and three of Strozier's students and colleagues (Konstantine Pinteris, Kathleen Kelley, and Deborah Cher), two of whom were also Strozier's patients. The writing of a book by an analyst in collaboration with his patients would never have been possible in the post-Freudian world of ego psychology. In that world, patients didn't interact with their therapists and were assumed to know next to nothing about them. This was because analysis was believed to cure by interpretations that made the patient's unconscious conscious, and for this to happen, the analyst needed to be a blank screen upon which the patient projected unconscious infantile sexual and aggressive wishes. The more “real” the analyst was to the patient, the theory had it, the less the analyst could be an object of unconscious fantasy. As a result, relations between patient and analyst—always behind
Jeffrey Stern, Training and Supervising Analyst, The Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, 615 W. Deming Place, Apt. 401, Chicago, IL 60614
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the couch and unseen by the patient—had something of the formality, ritual quality, and mystery of the confessional. Patients were also discouraged from getting to know one another, again to preserve the anonymity of the analyst.
Kohut, however, rejected drive theory and with it the idea that the analyst couldn't be a person to his o