Chapter 1 From the Kohut Archives

In 1994 the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis established a special collection relating to the life of Heinz Kohut. Arnold Goldberg created these archives and has been assiduous in soliciting materials for it from far and wide. The collection now includes copies of the complete correspondence (to and from Kohut); extensive materials from the files of the Institute itself; and a great deal of other letters, tapes, and documents. I have made many visits to the archives in the last few years in connection with the research for my forthcoming biography, Heinz Kohut and the Self: The Future of Psychoanalysis. There are any number of additional books and dissertations to be written using the collection. Partly to make their existence more widely known, I once suggested to Goldberg, and he agreed, that we include in Progress in Self Psychology a section on the publication of interesting material in the archives. The plan is to make “From the Kohut Archives” a regular part of the Progress series.

What follows are some previously unpublished letters of Kohut's from the 1940s to the late 1970s. The letters include all kinds of interesting new perspectives on Kohut himself and his ideas. The last item is a copy of a page from Kohut's shorthand, in which he wrote the first draft of all important papers, books, and some letters—and in which he took his patient notes in spiral notebooks. He learned the shorthand first in Vienna as a student at the University. For his publications and some important letters, he would then dictate the second draft from his shorthand, have that transcribed, edit it, have it retyped, and repeat that process as many times as it took until he was satisfied that he had a final version. But the first draft was always in the shorthand. This particular page of his shorthand comes from the version of the talk he first gave at his 60th birthday party