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‘In Britain there is a curious tendency to pronounce Kohut's name incorrectly as “Cahoot”. The correct pronunciation, as used by American colleagues, is simply Ko-(as in low)-hut’ (p. xi). This is just one of the distortions about Kohut and his work that Phil Mollon endeavours to clarify for us. As he says in the Preface:
It has seemed to me that Kohut's theories & insights have in many ways been eclipsed before they have been fully understood & integrated within psychoanalysis … my reason for writing the present book was to revisit in depth & detail, Kohut's own accounts of his theory & clinical work, and, in so doing, to interact with his ideas, linking them with contemporary perspectives within psychoanalysis
I wanted to read this book because I had been exposed to ideas that purported to be extensions of Kohut's work that I had felt uncomfortable with and I wanted to know more about Kohut's original work. I was also attracted to the book because Mollon is a British analyst and I hoped that he would contextualize Kohut's American work within a British framework. It was an extra bonus that Mollon linked Kohut's work to a multiplicity of contemporary psychoanalytical ideas, some of them American and European, as well as recent British developments. The book is a tour de force, introducing the reader to much of Kohut's written work and to an extensive vocabulary of terms such as ‘selfobject’, ‘transmuting internalization’, ‘inherent developmental agenda’, ‘compensatory development’, and many more. Concepts and terms are made accessible through clinical and theoretical discussion, and in some cases arguments are developed with different schools of psychoanalytic thought, which enable the reader to place the work in relation to other developments both historically and conceptually. Some readers will be aware that Mollon has already written extensively about Kohut and the application of his work and is well qualified to write the current book. The disadvantage of