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This installment of material from the Kohut Archives at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis includes four of Kohut's letters from his last decade and a segment of his writings not previously published. The letters range from a good example of how carefully he cultivated his relationship with Kurt Eissler, even as it deteriorated; his keen awareness of the role of narcissism in politics (in the letter to Lucia Tower); the raw hurt he felt at the attacks he endured and the numbness they evoked in him (in his letter to Wallerstein); and his very interesting reflections on defining criteria for determining greatness in music (in his letter to Levarie).
I am also including in this installment a fragment Kohut wrote in the late 1960s or early 1970s on social class and self-formation but never published and never really finished. It was originally part of a long manuscript I edited at his request: “On Courage,” which was published posthumously in Self Psychology and the Humanities (Kohut, 1985). The segment did not fit editorially into that essay but, in retrospect, works well as an independent statement in the context of this section of stray documents from the archives. “From the Kohut Archives” begins with this fragment to which I have given a somewhat arbitrary title and the first part of which I have edited to make it stand better on its own. Otherwise, I have recorded faithfully the text as edited by Kohut himself in what was probably the third draft: the first in shorthand, the second the typed version of his own dictation from the shorthand, and this third version that incorporates his handwritten changes on the triple-spaced page.