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When a work by a major figure has been lying fallow and then is belatedly excavated and edited by others for publication, such a history often suggests that the book will be peripheral to the analyst's main writings, of interest primarily because of an author's prominence rather than for the work's intrinsic value.
The set of 25 lectures delivered in 1974-1975 to advanced candidates at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis fits this picture. The book will occupy a minor position in the self psychology literature for three reasons. First, the lectures do not represent Kohut's mature thought; according to the editors, they were given at a time when Kohut's thought was in transition. He had been distancing himself further from drive theory but was “not yet able to articulate clearly the broader concept of a supraordinate self” (p. xii). Second, unlike his major works, these lectures are not well organized, not, as Kohut himself put it, “nicely systematized” (p. ix). Rather, they are spontaneous, meandering, and often redundant. Third, they do not contain significant new material.
For these reasons, then, the lectures would not be the best choice either for the newcomer to, or the advanced student of, Kohut's thought. Both kinds of readers would be better served by works selected either from Kohut's own principal monographs (especially his posthumous How Does Analysis Cure? [1984]) or from the numerous introductory expositions and advanced writings available in the copious and still growing secondary literature on self-psychological theory and clinical practice.
The work is potentially useful for two reasons, however. First, as the editors and also the reviewers cited on the book's dust jacket point out, the lectures have a certain historical interest. Being positioned in a transitional era when Kohut's thought was evolving in a particular way, they can provide useful material for those