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“At half past ten, just as the other four panelists wound up their comments, the ambulance arrived at the Berkeley campus lecture hall. A curious crowd instantly gathered near the ambulance. The driver removed a wheelchair, and Kohut got out of the front door to sit in it. He had a grim, set look on his face that baffled many who knew him. He seemed to look through them. He was completely focused. A silent parting of those gathered near the ambulance made room for Kohut to pass, with his wife at his side, and approach the entrance to the lecture hall. At the doorway Kohut deliberately rose from the wheelchair and began the long walk to the podium” (p. 374).
Such is the detailed, dramatic and moving description of the prelude to Kohut's final self psychology lecture to an enraptured audience of conference attendees in October, 1981, four days before he would succumb to his years-long bout with cancer. The reader of this book will find many such evocative passages that describe the unfolding of Kohut's life and the chronology of his ideas and his work, thanks to the painstaking, finely annotated and exhaustive research by biographer, history professor, and supervising and training psychoanalyst, Charles B. Strozier. (Strozier, incidentally, was among the five hundred who heard Kohut give that final speech.) Empathy is the way of knowing in psychoanalysis, a frail Kohut was to tell his listeners that day, and the precondition