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.
How does analysis cure? is a fitting capstone to Heinz Kohut's life's work. Here we have before us the considered conclusions of a psychoanalytic investigator who, as all who knew him can attest, was very careful to avoid premature closure, preferring to leave himself open to clinical experience as long as possible. In this volume (1984) he answers many of the questions that were raised over the years by both students and critics of self psychology, as his contributions to psychoanalysis have come to be called. Elizabeth Kohut writes in the preface that her husband told her that with this book he felt he had completed what he had hoped to accomplish, and indeed his sense of secure achievement and hard-earned conviction comes through clearly and convincingly in these pages. Although this posthumously published volume was prepared from a draft completed shortly before the author's death, the voice throughout is unmistakably Kohut's, there are no false notes, for this we are indebted to Arnold Goldberg, the book's editor, and his collaborator, Paul Stepansky.
Not surprisingly, no more than any of Kohut's other works, is this an easy book to read; it must, and deserves to be, studied carefully — the effort to do so will be amply rewarded. Typically for him, Kohut does not finish his discussion of one topic before going on to the next one; rather, he takes up an issue, discusses it from one perspective, then leaves it only to return to it later when it makes