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How Does Analysis Cure? is an important book. In it, Heinz Kohut presents the final reformulation and summation of his ideas, his expansion of classical psychoanalysis into self psychology. Several of the
chapters had been written over the last five years of Kohut's life, and had been presented and critiqued at various self psychology conferences along the way. It was in Berkeley, California, in 1981, that an ailing Kohut presided over a discussion of the chapter on termination. One week later he was dead, leaving his manuscript to be edited in its present form by Arnold Goldberg and Paul Stepansky, with ultimate approval exercised by his wife, Elizabeth Kohut. We can be grateful that the final product reflects little of what must have been a complicated collaboration. The writing is crisp, the logic clear, and only minor repetitions and somewhat parenthetical reflections mar an otherwise concise coda to Kohut's life work. One can imagine that the repetitions and asides reflect a diligent effort to preserve, as much as possible, not only the thoughts, but the thinking process, of this creative mind.
The book is organized in two parts, Part One, 'The Restoration of the Self —responses and after-thoughts', comprised of Kohut's considerations on, and answers to, questions and concerns of his readers, provoked by that watershed book (1977) ; and Part Two, 'The nature of the psychoanalytic cure', composed of a series of original and provocative thoughts that justify the book's arresting title. The Introduction by Goldberg orients the reader, naming the hypotheses put forward by Kohut, including the nature of analytic cure; an elaboration on the concept of empathy; the self-psychological view of the Oedipus complex; a revised view of defence and resistance; and a significant addition to the variety of self-object transferences already identified.
The overriding question this book, as a final statement, will provoke i