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.
Despite his enormous current popularity, Kohut is stylistically offputting for many readers. Early on, Anna Freud pointed out that his excessive use of Einschachtelungen (insertions) (Cocks, 1994, p. 183) discouraged his audience in its struggle to understand his exact meaning. And the many cautious qualifications that he used to minimize his growing divergence from the psychoanalytic establishment had a similar effect. His formal prose simply does not compare happily with his reputation as a brilliant and charismatic extemporaneous speaker and lecturer. Certainly many of us who teach Kohut today become aware quickly that bafflement and a subsequent lack of enthusiasm afflict contemporary students no matter how attracted they may have been at the start to his ideas.
Allen Siegel has written a book that serves the valuable purpose of making more accessible to a professional readership ideas whose profound impact has transfigured psychoanalytic theorizing and therapy. And he has done this without the oversimplification, polemics, or sentimentality that mar many previous attempts to synthesize Kohut's work and that Kohut himself so deeply deplored. Indeed, I think that Siegel, who was a candidate at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis during the time that Kohut was still living and when the excitement generated by his thinking was still at first hand, has succeeded admirably in his twofold purpose: to stimulate readers to tackle Kohut directly and to demonstrate that changes that have emerged from Kohutian theory have particular relevance to today's wide range of clinical problems and therapeutic modalities. To this end he has provided readers a bridge, by way of his own lucid prose, between Kohut's “experience-near” data and his extremely forbidding discourse.
The book is straightforward in structure. It begins with a brief