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Creative people are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to their predecessors. Emphasising the discontinuities between new work and old brings new ideas into sharp focuses. It also gratifies the creator's narcissism. But too sharp a demarcation from older ideas has its problems—conservative backlash, loss of what is valuable in the older concepts, disruption of institutional and personal relationships, simple incomprehension and the appearance of arrogance. Emphasising continuities may spare the creative person some of these difficulties. But demonstrating continuities can be a difficult and time-consuming job that distracts from creative work. The new work may become constricted as its author struggles between expressing and hiding novelty. All this is further complicated by intense transferences towards the representatives of the current orthodoxy.
The tension between emphasising novelty and continuity, so well described for poetry by Harold Bloom (1973, 1982), is equally present in the sciences. It is particularly problematic in psychoanalysis. Every analyst knows how painful and destructive differences of opinion have been in the history of our field. Whether it be out of a wish to maintain social ease with colleagues, or the hope of receiving patient referrals from them; whether it comes from a desire to advance within one's institute or to avoid the black hole for energy created by institutional splits; whether it reflects genuine humility about the difficulty of making real contributions to psychoanalysis or fears of personal attacks in the form of interpretations of one's motive for putting forward new ideas, the prudent analyst will think long and hard before separating himself from the continuity of current analytic thinking.
As his investigations led him towards self-psychology, Heinz Kohut faced these dilemmas with great intensity. Kohut not only admired Freud to the point of idealisation, he greatly valued being part of the psychoanalytic commun