You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Heinz Kohut has been revered and disparaged for the same reason: He altered the course of psychoanalysis by changing the paradigm from drive theory and ego psychology to a psychology based on a holistic view of the self. One analytic camp sees this as the fulfillment of Freud's legacy, another as its betrayal.
As Charles Strozier's (2001) comprehensive biography of the man makes clear, Kohut saw himself, on the one hand, as standing on Freud's shoulders and, relying on the psychoanalytic mode of exploration, probing into ever deeper layers of the emotional world of man. On the other hand, he was in tense, internal dialogue and growing conflict with Freud as he strove to articulate his own ideas, which eventually took him away from Freud and resulted in the formulation of the Psychology of the Self.
The guiding idea of this special issue of The Psychoanalytic Review is to look back from our current vantage point—50 years after the publication of Kohut's groundbreaking work, The Analysis of the Self in 1971, and 40 years after his death in 1981—and highlight his essential contributions to psychoanalysis, taking stock, as it were, to show how Kohut anticipated and paved the way for the future of psychoanalysis.
The so-called relational turn in American psychoanalysis is unthinkable without Kohut. His theory articulated the profound interdependence of self and object and recognized it as an essential dimension of human experience.
There exists an enormous body of literature on self psychology by followers of Kohut, who have elaborated on his ideas, as well as by his detractors. This issue of The Psychoanalytic Review does not address this body of work. It returns to Kohut's essential contributions and traces their evolution through his work.
In 1939, when Kohut was 26 years old, he is said to have gone to the train station when Freud was forced to leave his beloved Vienna, to show his reverence and see him off. Both men are said to have tipped their hats in recognition of on