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During the decade and a half that spanned his work from narcissism to self-psychology, Heinz Kohut was surrounded by younger colleagues who quickly understood, highly valued, and further developed many aspects of his original ideas. He had always hoped that a wider psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic audience would also grasp the significance and clinical utility of his expansion of psychoanalysis. He was eagerly waiting for the work of someone who never had any direct personal contact with him, who understood and appreciated his novel theory and clinical approach, as well as its underlying philosophy, entirely on the basis of his writings and their own clinical experience.
He would have been thoroughly delighted with the work of Phil Mollon for this very reason—Mollon had no personal contact with Kohut. In addition it would also have pleased him that it was a British psychoanalyst, with a thorough grasp of the relevant literature along with an impressive clinical sensitivity, who expressed in this work his profound understanding and high esteem for Kohut's innovative theory and clinical approach.
Mollon sets the record straight, which another British psychoanalyst, in his review of The Analysis of the Self (Kohut, 1971), considerably distorted as far as the originality of Kohut's clinical and theoretical contributions was concerned (James, 1973). James practically accused Kohut of having plagiarised the ideas of British object-relations theorists without adequate attribution, and wrote his review with his spleen and with unmistakable chauvinism rather than the reviewer's objectivity—albeit with some brilliance in certain passages.
Mollon, by contrast, is quite direct and explicit in his acknowledgement of Kohut's originality and the value of his contributions—even where he, too, wonders why Kohut did not give more credit to some of his British antecedents. However, he also recognises that Kohut's oeuvre is of one cloth, that it emerged from his own extensive clinical