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Charles Strozier's biography is a rare and delightful surprise. Neither sanctimonious nor apologetic, the book is a welcome relief in the often fractious and ambitious world of psychoanalytic biographers since the days of Ernest Jones. Trained as a self psychologist, Strozier appreciates the developmental and therapeutic uses of idealization. As a biographer, however, he offers a rich and nuanced portrait of a complex man. For instance, Strozier acknowledges that much of his subject's writing is obtuse and jargon-laden, but never are the ideas themselves cast aside. Instead, the author systematically clarifies the body of Kohut's work, taking us on a developmental journey. At first the gifted, charismatic, narcissistically vulnerable Heinz embraces orthodoxy. As he ages and sickens, he breaks out of the mold with the support of a fawning group of talented, but younger, impressionable colleagues. Ultimately a national movement is formed in which identity and empathy are placed on par with conflict and interpretation, forever altering the theory and technique of psychoanalysis.
Strozier toiled at least twenty years on this project, taking time to interview family, patients, colleagues, and friends, and waiting for Kohut's correspondence to be released in 1994. The resulting volume is packed with evocative tidbits that only intimates would know. We receive an affecting picture of Kohut's own noisy grandiosity when he insists on sitting naked in his hospital bed long after a favorite nurse bathed and powdered him. Other medical personnel refuse to enter his room and call him a “pervert,” (p. 323), but this does not deter a delighted Kohut from his show. Similarly, Strozier recaptures a dinner conversation between Kohut and Michael Franz Basch, a creative disciple who was also