Heinz Kohut (May 3, 1913 – October 8, 1981) was a Jewish Austrian-born American psychoanalyst best known for his development of self psychology, an influential school of thought within psychodynamic/psychoanalytic theory which helped transform the modern practice of analytic and dynamic treatment approaches.
His father was an aspiring concert pianist, but abandoned his dreams having been traumatized by his experiences in World War I and moved into business with Paul Bellak.
[4] After Austria was annexed to Germany by Hitler on March 12, 1938, the new regime presented difficulties for Kohut, as he still had to take his final exams at the medical faculty.
A friend from Vienna, Siegmund Levarie, who had emigrated to live with an uncle in Chicago and who would subsequently become a famous musicologist in the United States, arranged a visa for him and invited him to join him there.
Interestingly, Sigmund Freud only mentioned this phenomenon in passing in a footnote in one of his articles ("A path leads from identification by way of imitation to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by means of which we are enabled to take up any attitude towards the life of another soul.
After an intervention by Max Gitelson, who argued that the journal should not engage itself in ideological censorship, the editorial board reconsidered the paper and eventually published it in 1959.
He examines here the actions of Franz Jägerstätter, Hans and Sophie Scholl during Hitler's reign in Germany and their willingness to accept death as their only reward.
[24][25] In the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, Freudian analysis focused on individual guilt and tended not to reflect the new zeitgeist (the emotional interests and needs of people struggling with issues of identity, meaning, ideals, and self-expression).
In contrast to traditional psychoanalysis, which focuses on drives (instinctual motivations of sex and aggression), internal conflicts, and fantasies, self psychology thus placed a great deal of emphasis on the vicissitudes of relationships.
The manuscript was considered to be difficult by the group, and the comments convinced Kohut that he had to write a new beginning to this book, which then became its first chapter, entitled "Introductory Considerations."
Among the participants were such people as Alexander Mitscherlich from Frankfurt, Paul Parin from Zürich and Jacques Palaci from Paris, as well as many psychoanalysts from the United States, including e.g. René Spitz from Denver.
He came to the conclusion that many analysts had been shaming their analysands in the guise of offering interpretations, that neurotic pathology was only a cover for narcissistic problems, that idealization was not a form of defense, that everyone needs mirroring, and that rage is a byproduct of the disintegration of the self.
[38] In the article, Kohut wrote: Narcissistic rage occurs in many forms; they all share, however, a specific psychological flavor which gives them a distinct position within the wide realm of human aggressions.
The need for revenge, for righting a wrong, for undoing a hurt by whatever means, and a deeply anchored, unrelenting compulsion in the pursuit of all these aims which gives no rest to those who have suffered a narcissistic injury—these are features which are characteristic for the phenomenon of narcissistic rage in all its forms and which set it apart from other kinds of aggression.The article was possibly a miscalculation, because he ought to have written on this topic in one of his monographs, which were more widely read than his articles.
For him, wars, intolerance and repression were caused by a regression to a more primitive psychological level of the drives, from which our egos are separated only by a thin layer of civilization.
[39] According to Kohut,[40] Human aggression is most dangerous when it is attached to the two great absolutarian psychological constellations: the grandiose self and the archaic omnipotent object.
Rage, on the other hand, consists of a desperate need for revenge, an unforgiving fury for righting a wrong, when one's self has disintegrated due to an experienced slight.
He starts by making some comments on the psychoanalytic community, and then moves to Freud's self-analysis and his relationship with Wilhelm Fließ, but in the end he writes about charismatic and messianic personalities.
Charismatic and messianic personalities evolve from childhood situations, in which the child has been given empathy at first, but then the mirroring and idealized figures have caused them "abrupt and unpredictable frustrations".
Kohut had decided to make his new book more accessible, and he worked together with Natalie Altman, his publisher's editor, who would read and comment on his text.
Nearly all principles of psychoanalytic technique, inherited from Freud, were now in the line of fire: the drive theory, the central role of infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex, the close relationship between conflicts, defenses and resistances, and working through.
[50] Kohut says that The Restoration of the Self "is not a technical or theoretical monograph written detachedly by an author who has achieved mastery in a stable and established field of knowledge".
On the contrary, "it is a report of an analyst's attempt to struggle toward greater clarity in an area that, despite years of conscientious effort, he was unable to understand within the available psychoanalytic framework."
He says he had tried to integrate his thoughts with those of previous thinkers, but this[51][52] would have entangled me in a thicket of similar, overlapping, or identical terms and concepts which, however, did not carry the same meaning and were not employed as a part of the same conceptual context.Kohut bypasses most authors in the field of psychoanalysis, but not Freud.
He is in constant dialogue with him, and often finds himself contradicting him: Freud is no longer a relevant thinker from the point of view of history, or conceptually, therapeutically of philosophically.
"[54] "In Freud's early work with hysteria, Kohut argues, he probably cured mostly through suggestion and the mighty force of his belief in the rightness of his views," writes Strozier.
Mr. X. was a German student of theology analyzed by Eckstaedt, but Kohut had disguised him as a young American man, who had wanted to join the Peace Corps but had been turned down.
Thomas Kohut studied at the University of Chicago Lab School and eventually went through psychoanalytic training, but then decided to make a career as a historian and a psychohistorian.
Strozier argues that Else's craziness liberated Kohut's creativity and made it possible for him to study the deeper meanings of highly regressed states and thus to write his first and most important monograph, The Analysis of the Self.
Thomas Kohut was at the time studying at Oberlin College, which had a long history in opposing all kinds of social injustice, beginning with opposition to slavery and being an important station in the Underground Railroad.