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Perhaps you know me well enough by now to realize that I see the major issue of life not in the terms of the outcome of the struggle for dominance, but in the terms of the outcome of the struggle to maintain active creativeness. Creativeness, however, depends in the last analysis on the ability to be in touch with the playful child deep in the personality, and thus on the ability to maintain the freshness of the child's encounter with the world. All mature creativity … depends on our capacity to encourage the growth of that inner freedom.
I have always found the tortuous writings of Kohut to be exciting, stimulating, and highly influential in my practice of psychoanalysis and intensive psychotherapy. Even his published lectures show a certain charisma, while at the same time he preserves a chilly distancing formality. There is something about the way Kohut communicated that is not typically present in the writing of his followers or of most psychoanalysts, who tend to be more scholastic and focused on less interesting minutia. Somehow Kohut managed to place the grand sweep of our culture of narcissism (Lasch, ) in psychoanalytic perspective as well as the development of what he called Tragic Man—earning credit for a major creative accomplishment.
A whole variety of clinical phenomena such as various addictions, perversions, eating disorders, personality disorders in general, and even borderline and psychotic states may be discussed from an orientation that rests on Kohut's notion of the self, which I referred to in Chapter 3 as the self-psychology channel. In the writings of self psychologists, the precise definitions of concepts such as “muclear self” and “fragmentation” are never clear, but those who investigate their own life experiences are well aware that such concepts have immediate application. A number