Chapter 2 On Supervision with Heinz Kohut

This paper is about my experience with Heinz Kohut as a supervisor and as a teacher. It is an attempt to convey how this experience both affected me as a person and contributed to my development as a psychoanalyst. The paper describes the experience and the thoughts it stimulated, and is interspersed with descriptions of the consultation and clinical material. I first met Heinz Kohut for my matriculation interviews at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago in 1968. Later, as an advanced candidate, I was again exposed to Kohut at the Institute. Although he was not teaching a regular course at that time, he gave several lectures in the self psychology course. Kohut was a very charismatic teacher. He had an exquisite grasp of clinical material and an extraordinary ability to articulate it. He was able to engage people in listening to how he experienced another person and to how he technically would deal with that person in treatment. He presented and discussed very difficult cases utilizing his new theories, and the candidates responded to him with respect and admiration. An intellectual fervor surrounded him at that time. I found his new theories useful, helpful, and exciting, particularly with those patients who were unresponsive to a classical approach.

Soon after graduating from the Institute in 1975, I was invited to attend a postgraduate workshop on self psychology led by Kohut. I eventually became the workshop's secretary for two years and in this