Who Is Lotte Köhler?

For the younger readers of this journal, let me introduce an extraordinary woman, one of the first European psychoanalysts to recognize the revolutionary contributions being made in the 1970s by Heinz Kohut. Born in 1925, Lotte Köhler grew up in a Germany emptied out of Freudians and without exposure to original, contemporary, or denazified psychoanalysis. Then, Rene Spitz came to Munich, and she became aware of a psychoanalytic world beyond in Switzerland and France. Ron Bodansky (personal communication, April 6, 2013) tells the story of her tremendous engagement with self psychology:

After Kohut's (1968) article, “The Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders,” appeared, she became greatly influenced by his thoughts and his treatment of the transference. In 1971, she met Heinz Kohut personally during a weekend seminar he held in Chur (Switzerland). She invited Kohut to come to Munich to give a lecture in 1974, and both of them were extremely pleased at the success when over 1,000 people filled the university auditorium to hear Kohut speak and also about the echo in the press. Kohut invited her to come to Chicago where she met, in a working circle on perversion, Arnold Goldberg, Ernest Wolf, Paul and Anna Ornstein, and Paul and Marian Tolpin. She also had one week of supervision with Kohut in 1978, after the first International Self-Psychology Conference, where Evelyne Schwaber gave a case presentation. Through her, she became acquainted

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with the work of Louis Sander, and her interest in infant research became a great focus for her analytic understanding and publications. Through Sander's work, she learned about the research of, among others, Daniel Stern, Beatrice Beebe, and Virginia Demos. She invited Daniel Stern and Michael Basch to come to Munich in 1991, and they held together a four-day congress on their theories.

Later, she invited Paul Ornstein and Ernest Wolf to Munich for seminars, and provided generous funding for the biennial self