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Heinz Kohut is not among the authors integrated into the psychoanalytic tradition of the Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires and Montevideo), in which I was trained. Yet his ideas had a considerable influence on my development as a psychoanalyst. I wish to relate, through a clinical example, my initial encounter with Kohut's work and the challenge raised, in a key moment of my training, by an author whose concepts differed from those of my analytic community.
Analysts inevitably respond to a variety of influences and struggle to integrate them in a coherent way. But the conceptual compatibility of differing theories is a complex problem and its different dimensions are not always sufficiently examined. Addressing this issue, this article aims both to describe a case from my training (1975–1980) that was particularly evocative of Kohut's ideas, but also to look back from the present (2010), at the way in which I tried to combine Kohut with theories that were already a part of my training.
It is not easy to translate the conceptual language from one psychoanalytic school to that of another. This difficulty, along with the inertia of local tradition, likely accounts for the infrequency of systematic revisions of analytic thinking about a particular issue. The range of ideas presented in psychoanalytic texts is typically limited to concepts already familiar to the author. This limits the sources of innovation to the ideas of an author and others who already agree on theory, and increases the isolation of the various schools. Psychoanalytic training reinforces and extends this situation because most institutes reinforce a local tradition, ignoring innovations deriving from outside. But, at times, the ideas of one creative author break through the barriers and are received by analysts from other communities. I believe that the challenges derived from this phenomenon deserve to be studied.
The reception of new ideas is influenced by t