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Heinz Kohut's writings form the core of the psychoanalytic movement known as Self Psychology. Allen Siegel acknowledges that Kohut is difficult to read: his style
is Germanic, so one searches his lengthy sentences for the verb that will bring sense and order in contrast to his renown as a fluent coherent extempore speaker. Siegel has rendered Kohut's writing into an attractive readable text. There are several informative clear diagrams which outline both Freud's and Kohut's theories of psychic structure.
In the opening chapter, Ernest Wolf, Kohut's close collaborator, sketches Kohut's personality:
A strange mixture of aloof, aristocratic and almost puritanical austerity in a warmly responsive and considerate person; a very private person.
A curious mixture indeed! Kohut was intensely musical, a wine buff, an ardent runner before running became widespread. He concealed for ten years the chronic leukaemia from which he died, and gave his final address only three days before his death.
Kohut was a Vice-President of the American Psychoanalytical Association. Anna Freud stayed with him when she visited Chicago. It is important to recognise his stature in that he was an influential teacher at the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis before he developed his own theories. Siegel gives a good account of his admired two-year course on psychoanalysis given between 1958 and the late ‘6s, in which he stressed the continuous change in psychoanalytic theory. At that time it was in contrast to the dogmatic teaching that characterised many of the other North-American institutes. His 1963 paper, written jointly with Philip Seitz, reprinted in The Search for the Self is a model on the concepts and theories of psychoanalysis.
Siegel admires Kohut, and believes that his contribution, like Freud's, will prove of enduring value. He states that Kohut created a new atmosphere in the consulting-room. Convinced that the defective Self is responsible for the patient's sufferings, the analyst liste