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Kohut was one of the most influential psychoanalysts of recent decades. Even those colleagues who disagreed with his ideas and with his modifications of more traditional psychoanalytic thought will grant his ability to sway co-workers and students inside and outside of psychoanalysis to give serious consideration to his psychology of the self. As the writer of three books and more than a dozen scientific papers he became a centre of attention and controversy in the psychoanalytic community. The private correspondence of such a creative psychoanalytic theoretician and clinician is of great interest for the elaboration and clarification it adds to the published oeuvre. Ninety-three letters from the last twenty years of Kohut's life have already appeared in The Search for the Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut. In the present volume, Geoffrey Cocks, a historian, makes public an additional three hundred plus letters that have never been published before. They range from a note to his Daddy by 7-year-old Heinz to a brief letter to his son Tom a few weeks before Kohut's death in 1981. The first letters, all but one sent from Vienna before Kohut's emigration in March 1939, were addressed to his closest friend Siegmund Levarie in Chicago. After the war the rest of the letters emanated from his Chicago home or from travel or a holiday sojourn.
The editor's thirty-one-page introduction presents a valuable biographical-historical background as well as acquainting the reader with some of the issues that informed Kohut's work and his relationships with his psychoanalytic colleagues. In spite of Kohut's long and close friendships with a circle of collaborators and with others, he remained essentially a very private person who did not share much of his inner life nor the details of his personal past history. To the natural guardedness of the lonely boy grown into a celebrated adult must be added the ever present concern of the psychoanalyst for confidentiality and for preservin