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It is fortunate for posterity that Heinz Kohut kept up a rich and lively correspondence over five decades, from his life as an impressionable young student in pre- War Vienna to his years in America as a senior psychoanalytic scholar and teacher. Revered by students and colleagues, Kohut was later shunned and misunderstood by a significant number of psychoanalysts and mental health professionals Kohut, it can be argued, was one of the finest psychoanalytic thinkers and practitioners of his time His controversial work on narcissism influenced psychoanalytic teaching and has gradually been accepted on curricula within many psychoanalytic institutes, psychotherapy programs, and in general psychiatric residency training, and reaches a wide lay audience as well. Whether or not one agrees with Kohut's self-psychology theories and practice, no reader can fail to appreciate the accumulation of lived experience and clearly articulated argument in his epistles to friends, colleagues, critics, and family
Geoffrey Cocks explains that Kohut always remained a “very private person [and] the correspondence contained in this volume offers a more detailed and nuanced look at his life and career than has ever been possible before” (p 2)
In some ways Freud and Kohut were similar assimilated Jews who lived and studied medicine and neurology in the stirring, fractious atmosphere of Vienna Both men fled the Nazis—Freud at the end of his career, Kohut at the outset. Over a half-century separated the two men, and Kohut deeply admired Freud, though later saw him as a figure that he would necessarily depart from
This volume charts the challenging, difficult, and creative journey that Kohut took on his odyssey to self psychology
There is much that Cocks' introduction leaves the reader to consider Kohut's early years in Vienna, his love of music, the frequent absences of his father and his “essential deep loneliness” (p. 7), his devastation after his father's death of leukemia in 1937, analysis and