How Does Analysis Cure?: Heinz Kohut, edited by Arnold Goldberg in collaboration with Paul Stepansky,  University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 1984,  240 Pages, $25.00.

This book was written prior to Kohut's death in 1981 at age 68; it was then edited into final form by Arnold Goldberg and Paul Stepansky. In it Kohut sums up the theoretical and clinical contributions over his career. In addition, he continues to make further advances in his hypotheses about the nature of cure. He reviews former themes of interest and attempts to set right various misinterpretations of his work by numerous colleagues, including those sympathetic to his work. In this work, I hear Kohut striving for clarity as he further evolves the tenets of psychoanalytic self psychology. Aware as he was of his limited life expectancy, he took great pains to ensure that his ideas would be reviewed by posterity as close as possible to the meanings he intended. He was also concerned about the way self psychology would develop in the future, and he suggested various areas for continuing research, such as the further refinement and delineation of the self-object transferences. The outcome of his efforts is an exciting book which ranges widely over many topics of central concern to every psychoanalytic clinician and which provides much food for contemplative thought, whether or not the reader is an adherent of Kohut's philosophy.

Kohut's discussions range widely over the whole terrain of psychoanalysis. He comments on the philosophy of science that underlies it, the metapsychological theory that constitutes it, and the fundamental motivational concepts that are its body and soul. In his holistic theory of motivation, Kohut focusses on the “supraordinate” self of the person and the realization the self's nuclear program, as the fundamental motivational thrust of the personality. His emphasis on self-realization is not in itself original (see, for example, Rycroft, 1966), but we owe to Kohut the elaboration of this theme into an internally consistent system of theory and treatment. Holistic theories are not new to psychoanalysis, but Kohut's theory of the bipolar self surpa