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This paper places the reception of Heinz Kohut and his ideas about narcissism in the German-speaking lands in the 1970s–1980s in multiple contexts. First, there was the difficulty of returning psychoanalysis to post-Nazi West Germany and Austria, lands in which psychoanalysis had been furiously derided as sex-obsessed, “filthy,” and “Jewish.” Ironically, it was to be an ex-Nazi – animal behavior specialist Konrad Lorenz, author of On Aggression – who in the 1960s set in motion the conversation that ultimately brought psychoanalysis back to post-Nazi nations. Second, the paper explains how the German-language reception of Kohut, which was initially enthusiastic, unfortunately could not be separated from broader media discussions of the American critic Christopher Lasch’s bestseller of 1979, The Culture of Narcissism. The unexpected entanglement of Kohut’s reception with popular discussion of Lasch inadvertently turned young analysts against him. Third, though, the paper introduces unexpected marvelous uses to which Kohut’s ideas were concretely put. For there was one Swiss analyst, Fritz Morgenthaler, mentor to young New Left-allied analysts, who was in close empathic-but-critical dialogue with Kohut, and who found Kohut’s work on narcissism clinically highly useful, even as he gave it a sex-radical twist at odds with Kohut’s more sexually conservative approach. Indeed, it was specifically in his engagement with Kohut’s work that Morgenthaler became the first European analyst, since Freud, to declare that homosexuality was not a pathology.