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This third installment of material from the Kohut Archives at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis includes a range of letters from Kohut's life and work. The selection begins with a 1965 letter to Harry Slochower that indicates the depth of Kohut's appreciation for the subtleties of interpreting literature psychoanalytically. The letter to E. James Anthony is light but shows Kohut's appreciation for eloquence. The 1968 telegram to his friend, Alexander Mitscherlich, is part of Kohut's abiding respect for Mitscherlich's role in the recreation of psychoanalysis in Germany after the war. Kohut had a practice of sending telegrams to his older psychoanalytic friends on their birthdays. The two letters to Lester Schwartz in 1974 are an unusual opportunity to witness Kohut discussing a case, since Thomas A. Kohut (on his father's orders) destroyed all obvious references to case material in the correspondence before a complete set of copies was turned over to the Institute in 1994. The letters to Louis Shapiro, Tilmann Moser, and Bernard Brandchaft are from Kohut's abundant supply of letters to friends and colleagues in the 1970s. He kept up a prodigious correspondence in these years.
I have also included in this selection two letters from Kohut's best friend, Robert Wadsworth. Born on the same day, Kohut and Wadsworth dubbed each other “birthday brothers” when they first met in Chicago through their mutual friend, Siegmund Levarie, on March 5, 1940. There are no extant letters from Kohut to Wadsworth and only a handful from Wadsworth to Kohut (though Levarie has shared with me letters from the 1940s between the two as part of his personal collection). It is not clear why the most important person in Kohut's life outside his family is so absent from his correspondence.