Heinz Kohut and John Bowlby: The Men and Their Ideas

Heinz Kohut and John Bowlby, working independently, contributed to a paradigm shift within psychoanalysis. Their combined work dramatically changed the way many psychoanalysts understand the effect of parent–child relationships on human development, as well as the very nature of psychopathology. This, in turn, transformed clinical practice as their ideas spread and many analysts became more emotionally responsive, creating a friendlier, more respectful therapeutic ambiance.

Essential to both men's thinking is a deep and abiding belief in the central need for relationships beginning at birth and lasting throughout life. Further, they recognized how a parent's responsiveness to a child's needs for comfort and protection plays a crucial role in the child's psychological development with an outcome of either healthy adjustment or psychopathology hanging in the balance.

In articulating these positions, they differed with the mainstream psychoanalytic views of their time. The classical psychoanalytic perspective focused on intrapsychic conflict over a set of drives, libido, and aggression. In both the theory and practice of the prevailing Freudian tradition, the greatest attention was given to exploring a patient's instinctual life as expressed in fantasy, rather than to actual experiences during childhood. Kohut and Bowlby came to see that such an intrapsychic focus on drives and fantasies came at the expense of recognizing important developmental needs for relatedness. Also, they saw how an exclusive preoccupation with elucidating a patient's intrapsychic conflicts could interfere with the therapist's ability to grasp the very real and adverse impact of unresponsive (or abusive) parenting during childhood.

Kohut's and Bowlby's individual journeys as psychoanalytic clinicians and revolutionary theorists were dramatically different, yet both men broke with the predominant psychoanalytic dogma of their time and came to essentially the same viewpoint concerning th