Chapter 13 Heinz Kohut Memorial Lecture: Toward a Level Playing Field

Heinz Kohut (1959) inaugurated a major conceptual revolution in psychoanalysis with his publication of Introspection, Empathy and Psychoanalysis. By moving empathy from having been merely an ancillary theoretical and technical maneuver into a position of pivotal centrality, Kohut set in motion a series of theoretical and clinical developments that culminated in psychoanalytic self psychology. Many aspects of psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytic clinical practice were deeply affected by these developments. I shall attempt to demonstrate that the psychoanalyst's analytic spirit, the psychological posture with which a therapist approaches the task of analysis, has undergone a number of subtle but decisive permutations. Specifically, I am pointing to an attitudinal change that has transformed a quasiauthoritarian psychoanalytic milieu into a more egalitarian and empathically sensitive ambience. The roots of these shifts antedate Kohut's emphasis on empathy. It is as if a sea-change of Western sensibility was reflected in psychoanalysis in the theoretical concepts introduced by self psychology and found expression in the alterations of the clinical analytic ambience.

However, it is not easy to trace the reciprocal influences of psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytic practice, and even more difficult to relate more general cultural changes to the subtle modifications of analyst-analysand interactions. Galatzer-Levy and Cohler (1989) commented that “a shift in what psychoanalysts hope to achieve through their investigations” (p. 3) has been observed. The