1 Glimpses of a Life: Heinz Kohut (1913-1981)

I assume the task of telling some of Heinz Kohut's story with great trepidation. Readers of this volume are not only well aware of and interested in his work but number among them friends and colleagues who knew him much better than I. Many go back years, if not decades, with Heinz Kohut. They have their memories and pictures of him stamped. I can only hope my work contributes to and enhances the memories of those who were really close to him, just as my primary source lies in what several of his friends have already told me of him, material that I have shamelessly appropriated and that I hope in the coming years will be expanded considerably. For let me make clear that another source of my trepidation is that I am nowhere near the end of my work on this project. I need much more time to interview Kohut's family and friends, his colleagues, his admirers and critics alike, former patients, everybody and anybody who knows anything and is willing to share memories and thoughts with me. Furthermore, Kohut's life blended into the larger story of the Chicago Institute since the war and, to some degree, the whole history of psychoanalysis since Freud. Before he was 50, Kohut was labeled—and he bore proudly—the title “Mr. Psychoanalysis.” Unlike cult figures like Erikson who left mainstream psychoanalysis for the universities and who wrote better prose, Kohut faithfully and diligently kept the psychoanalytic flame alive, serving on innumerable committees in Chicago and in the American Psychoanalytic Association and gaining the respect of everyone in the field from Anna Freud to Heinz Hartmann to colleagues closer to home in Chicago who had long known he was special. His publications before 1971 were relatively few and, though always interesting and even remarkable, they were, as he himself later noted, safe. Keep in mind that as late as The Analysis of the Self in 1971 Kohut was still using obscure terminology like “narcissistic libido” to express some really new ideas. Thi