You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
By the time that I received the generous invitation to review The New World of Self: Heinz Kohut’s Transformation of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis by Charles B. Strozier, Konstantine Pinteris, Kathleen Kelley and Deborah Cher, I had already read it twice-once to discuss it among a group of senior self psychologists in the Chicago area and a second time in order to teach the book to a cohort of emerging self psychologists. That fact encapsulates my overall assessment of The New World of Self; it is a crystal clear, marvelously accessible depiction of the essence of Heinz Kohut’s ideas while not sacrificing depth, complexity and nuance in the process. I imagine that this book will endure, dogeared on many shelves, serving both younger and seasoned clinicians alike for many years to come.
In addition to the juxtaposition of accessibility and depth, the authors also convey both deep admiration for Kohut (identifying him, along with Freud as one of two foundational thinkers in the history of psychoanalysis), alongside a candor about him that includes a recognition of the murkiness around those ideas that his untimely death and/or the zeitgeist of the time in history left incompletely evolved or articulated. For example, although the authors are unequivocal in stating that self psychology is not a one-person psychology, they acknowledge Kohut’s failure to precisely delineate the mutually influential impact of empathy in the analyst-patient encounter. They suggest that he may have felt that to do so would have only made it literal and dogmatic. Rather than expressing ideas dogmatically, the authors emulate Kohut by creating space for the art that is psychoanalysis, an idea that is baked into self psychology, where the analyst has no pre-ordained understanding of the patient and remains fully open to immersing himself in the patient’s inner world, using his own subjectivity (including his developmental theory and sense of self) to develop a working understanding of his pa