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Heinz Kohut's first psychoanalytic paper was titled “Death in Venice by Thomas Mann: The Disintegration of Artistic Sublimation.” It was written in 1948, long before self psychology. In this early article, Kohut interpreted Mann's novella from the perspective of traditional psychoanalytic theories that prevailed at mid-century.
Death in Venice (Mann, 1912) is the story of an aging writer, Gustav von Aschenbach, who becomes fatally fascinated with a handsome adolescent boy named Tadzio. Near the end of this long short story, Aschenbach has a climactic nightmare that Kohut (1948) interpreted as “the undisguised emergence of a primal-scene experience” (p. 126) in which the child was traumatized by observing adult sexual activities. Kohut went on to declare“There is little doubt, too, that [Aschenbach's] homosexual desires and fears must have originated during such experiences—that the child must have been partially identified with the mother and must have wished for the sexual love of the father” (p. 126).
At best, Mann's text offers scant support for Kohut's primal scene interpretation. This chapter suggests that Kohut's later notion of the selfobject experience offers a more interesting perspective from which to view this celebrated story and from which to understand