Greif GF. The Tragedy of the Self. Individual and Social Disintegration Viewed through the Self Psychology of Heinz Kohut:  University Press of America, 2000,  xiv + 132 pp.

It is clear from the very title that Dr. Greif has written an unusual book on Heinz Kohut. Although many books and papers have been written on Kohut's theoretical standpoints, therapeutic innovations, and even his life and correspondence, this one is dedicated to a somewhat neglected topic. This is a book written by a scientist who is obviously not a clinician, and it attempts an integration of Kohut's many — and scattered! — ideas about modern man's position in the world that surrounds him. One can wonder why Kohut's followers have elaborated other aspects of his theory, while partly neglecting this one, and it would be valuable to know why Kohut himself had done the same, even though he frequently claimed his passions lay in this field at least equally as in the field of depth psychology. Although he admitted that, could he choose once again, he would rather be a historian than a psychoanalyst, and although he often addressed “a self-psycho-logically informed historian,” he wrote comparatively little on the topic. Only several of his numerous papers are devoted to relations between psychoanalysis and science of history, and none of his three books deals solely with it. Still, quantity is not all. His ideas, although not expressed as a well-rounded system, and often left in form of sketches, brief hypotheses, or associations, do provide extraordinary inspiration and a starting point for a careful reader who would like to elaborate Kohut's unwritten Beyond ‘Civilization and its Discontents,’ in a way he himself has continuously contemplated on how to get beyond Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, to state this rather freely.

Although the relation between the individual and the society is a problem that puzzled various authors ever since ancient times and intrigues several contemporary scientific disciplines, new questions still arise every now and then. The disintegration, the topic of this book, is a rather recent phenomenon, described and explained in different