Historical Inaccuracy

Dear Dr. Jurist:

I am writing to you about the article in the July issue of Psychoanalytic Psychology by Frank Summers entitled “Theoretical Insularity and the Crisis of Psychoanalysis.” In that article, on p. 416, the following statement is made: “Sometime in the 1970s, Kohut asked George Pollock, then the Director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, for a self psychology curriculum to be included in the training program. When Pollock refused, Kohut considered breaking away and forming his own institute. Although the founder of self psychology decided to stay at the Chicago Institute, Pollock never forgave him, and the bitterness and enmity between the ego and self psychologists at that institute is still evident.”

This is untrue. I was a colleague and friend of Heinz Kohut, and together we taught a class on self psychology that George Pollock attended. I asked several friends about Summers's statement and they all agreed that it had no basis in fact. I also asked Charles Strozier, the biographer of Heinz Kohut, and he sent me a letter confirming that Pollock always went out of his way to support Kohut. He wrote: “That is quite a remarkable and very unlikely story. Certainly, nothing about it ever found its way into Kohut's correspondence or any of the letters to him (for, as you know, he kept both the ‘incoming,’ as we call it in history, and his replies, which makes his archival correspondence particularly valuable and complete). That of course is not absolutely conclusive, but there is also indirect evidence. As far as I can tell, Pollock went out of his way to be institutionally supportive of Kohut. He began teaching self psychologically related courses the moment he made his own self transformation in that summer of 1965; in those fall courses, as I talk about in my book, Kohut was alive with his new ideas. Later, Pollock went out of his way to provide Institute support for Kohut…Pollock respected Kohut's genius and in all ways recognized that part of h