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Douglas Kirsner: It's struck me in talking to analysts in the U.S. that there's a lot of irrationality about your work. There are people who haven't necessarily read your work who say all sorts of things about you and your work which act as a projective screen for them. They seem to think you ignore conflict, ignore the unconscious, or that the kind of treatment you are writing about is just psychotherapy.
Heinz Kohut: Like a whispering campaign. Gossipy.
Kirsner: Why is it that they don't look at your work in a rational way?
Kohut: They don't read it. My joke is that either they don't read it or they read only between the lines, but not the lines.
Professor of Philosophy and History of Ideas, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia.
Mr. Kirsner is currently engaged in writing a book on the psychoanalytic movement in the United States, and in that connection has interviewed more than 70 analysts about the present state of psychoanalysis in America. His interview with Dr. Kohut took place at Dr. Kohut's apartment in Chicago on June 21, 1981, some four months before Dr. Kohut's death on October 8, 1981.
Kirsner: There are a lot of things in your work which are pretty clear.
Kohut: I would think so. I would hope so.
Kirsner: Why do you think you are so often misread?
Kohut: It's so difficult to judge that. I think the last few pages in the “Reflections” (Kohut, 1980), are important in terms of your interest. Psychoanalysis has a broad underpinning of the irrational, which I tried to characterize by playing up the word “movement” again. Science is not a movement, and yet psychoanalysis is clearly a science. So it's neither a movement nor is it a pure science—at least in its organized aspects. It is one of the most difficult things to ask a person like myself who is, as it were, a center of some kind of controversy, to have the degree of objectivity to judge the merits of the opposition. It's very, very difficult. In one of my essays which I consider to be among my very best—na