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This is the nearest to a biography of Kohut that is currently available, and provides not only a fascinating portrait of the man but also of his time and culture and of the place of psychoanalysis within that. We see the optimism of the New World, and of Kohut as a new migrant to it, the early vision of analysis as providing an understanding and perhaps solutions to man's problems, and generally the sense that the American Way was essentially correct; all of which appears as if of another and more naive era as we approach the millennium. Will there still be something called psychoanalysis in the twenty-first century?
Kohut was born in 1913, the year Freud wrote ‘On narcissism’, the paper which spawned much of Kohut's later theorising. He died in 1981. Like Freud, Kohut fled from Vienna to escape the Nazis. He arrived in Chicago as a young doctor and after an analysis with Ruth Eissler- which cost him $1200 per year out of a salary of $3000 - he rapidly became established in the 1950s as a leading figure in the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and eventually became President of the APA.
Kohut's reformulations of narcissism, which led to his development of ‘self psychology’, began in the mid-1960s, the major controversies being played out during the 1970s. Cocks presents in his introduction the rumour that Kohut's pivotal paper, ‘The two analyses of Mr Z’, is essentially autobiographical and that the account of the absent father and the psychotic intrusive mother reflected features of Kohut's own