Heinz Kohut

In late 1942 Kohut applied to the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, which had been founded by Franz Alexander in 1932, modelling it on the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute of the 1920s. Kohut was not accepted, and the rejection was decisive. The reason for this remains unclear, but Kohut was not even allowed to begin a didactic analysis. However, he found a clever way around this impasse by going into analysis, beginning in March 1943, with Ruth Eissler, who was a fellow Viennese and a fellow analysand of August Aichhorn and a training and supervising analyst at the institute. Furthermore, Ruth Eissler’s husband Kurt R. Eissler, also an analyst, was regarded by August Aichhorn as the most promising future leader of psychoanalysis in America.[7]

In 1944 Kohut decided to leave neurology and move into psychiatry, and in 1947 he was appointed associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago. He got his certification psychiatry in 1949.

In the fall of 1946 he had already been accepted to the Chicago Institute and began immediately on its courses. In the summer of 1947, he was given his first two “control” cases, followed by a third and a fourth case in early 1948. He began to receive patients on a permanent basis in 1949. In October 1950 he took his exams, passed them and became officially an analyst. He became a training and supervising analyst as well as a member of the institute’s staff in 1953.

Unlike Franz Alexander, who had sought to shorten analyses, Kohut took as long as it took for the patients to get well in analysis. The agenda came entirely from the patient, whose job it was to say whatever occurred to him or her. He said to one of his patients: “I will do what I can to help you try and understand yourself.”

He received his patients at the institute. All his patients are said to have adored him, although in the beginning of his career he had one case with which he failed miserably. Also, during the early years of his career as an analyst, his success was mixed.

Kohut analyzed several persons, who were already analysts but who felt they had not benefited as much from their didactic analyses as they had hoped. Some did their training analyses with him. These persons included Peter Barglow, Michael Franz Basch, George Klumpner, Paul Tolpin.[8]

Kohut’s work in teaching at the institute became his primary commitment for the rest of his life. He soon became known as the most gifted and creative analyst in the Chicago Institute. Together with Louis Shapiro and Joan Fleming, he rewrote the curriculum of the institute and taught its two-year theory course for a decade. The course was not one of the history of psychoanalysis but a study of “psychoanalytic psychology presented according to historical principles.” It was a very Freudian course and contained no hints of where he would later move in his theoretical views. Kohut appeared as a master of metapsychology in these lectures.

He later gave the course over to Philip Seitz, who had been auditing the course and had made notes of it that he had discussed with Kohut and then amended those notes in accordance of those discussions. This collaboration resulted in a joint article, entitled "Concepts and Theories of Psychoanalysis: Relation of Method and Theory" (1963).[9][10] Seitz published his notes more than three decades later in the form of a book.

Kohut's teaching style is said to have been brilliant, but at the same time it eclipsed the minds of the listeners, and according to Paul Ornstein who took the course, the style was pedagogically a failure. Other commentators have also said that Kohut’s brilliance made his students passive and did not encourage independent thinking.

Kohut felt that analysts should be scientists and not technicians who just applied a set of rules to their work. If the latter were to be the case, the whole field of psychoanalysis would be assimilated to dynamic psychiatry and disappear forever.[9][11][12]

Kohut was active in the American Psychoanalytic Association from the 1950s. He served on the board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and in a number of committees. But in the 1960s he rose to the top of this organization. First he was its secretary during 1961–62, then president-elect during 1962–63, and finally the president during 1964–65. This further cemented his friendship with Kurt and Ruth Eissler. Kurt Eissler was now one of the leading figures of the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute. He also became friends with Heinz Hartmann, who was a very important figure for him.

The last of these positions meant an incredible amount of work, preparing all kinds of meetings and working in a number of committees, as well as putting out all kinds of bush fires within the association. There was, for example, a question of whether analysts should or could express publicly their views about the mental health of Barry Goldwater.

Kohut was at time very much a representative of traditional Freudian analysis, and he was very careful not to do anything that could have been interpreted as a departure from traditional views. He was also careful about “his reputation as the chosen one to provide leadership for the next generation of psychoanalysts.” Much later he jokingly said that in the 1950s and early 1960s he was “Mr. Psychoanalysis.”

During this time Kohut became acquainted with everyone who mattered in psychoanalysis worldwide. For Kohut, the most important of these figures was Anna Freud. He first met her in 1964 in a meeting in Princeton. After that they were constantly writing to each other.

In the fall of 1966 the University of Chicago gave Freud an honorary doctoral degree. Kohut may have been among the people who initiated this idea, and when she came to Chicago for this event, she stayed with the Kohuts in their apartment. Various activities were arranged for her in Chicago, and for Kohut this visit was a great success.

In the long run Kohut began to feel that his work as the president drained his energies and kept him from developing his own ideas. He was also beginning to have ambivalent feelings about classical analysis. In addition, this position exposed him to people who were self-centered, full of themselves and narcissistic in the worst sense of the word. There was nothing wrong in the science of psychoanalysis, he felt, but the problem was in the people “who are carrying on their work on the basis of these ideas.” One could say that this was his higher education in matters related to narcissism.

Since he left his position of the president of The American, Kohut was in 1965 elected vice-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). In 1968 he was encouraged by Anna Freud and the Eisslers to run for the presidency of this world-wide organization, as in 1969 it was the Americans’ turn to have their representative elected. In the end it turned out that the European members of IPA were beginning to favour Leo Rangell, and thus Kohut would not stand a chance in the election. Anna Freud advised him not offer himself for a defeat, and Kohut withdrew from the race. He then explained this situation to his colleagues by saying that the presidency would have interfered with his creative work, which was a self-invented myth that many colleagues duly bought. Had Kohut been elected, it would have been likely that his first monograph, The Analysis of the Self would have remained his only main contribution to psychoanalytic theory.[13]

Beginning in 1946, Kohut’s friend Siegmund Levarie organized a series of concerts at the University of Chicago. In 1947, the response of the audience to a piece composed by Béla Bartók led him to write an article on some general principles of the psychology of music, which was published in 1950 in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly with the title “On the Enjoyment of Listening to Music.” Also in 1947 Kohut began to ponder Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice. In 1950 he wrote the final version of his thoughts on this novella and presented it as his graduation paper. He decided, however, not to publish it, as Mann was still alive. This article was finally published in 1957, also in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, two years after Mann’s death.[14]

Kohut’s first truly scientific contribution was his 1959 article on empathy, entitled "Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis: An Examination of the Relationship Between Mode of Observation and Theory", which was written for the twenty-fifth anniversary meeting of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis in November, 1957, and also presented by Kohut in a psychoanalytic congress in Paris the same year.

This theme actually relates to the very foundation of psychoanalysis, the ability of one human being potentially to gain access to the psychological states of another human being. 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.”[15] Kohut now took up the matter and gave a very thorough presentation on this subject, outlining what kind of subject matter can be approached with empathy and what cannot be approached with it. Essentially it means that empathy as a method defines the field that can be observed with its aid.

The basic thesis is that those phenomena that can be approached by means of empathy are called psychological (i.e. relate to the inner life of man), and those that cannot be approached with it, are non-psychological, i.e. physical phenomena and must be approached with our sensory equipment. The approach thus is epistemological.

Despite the warm reception of this paper in Chicago, it was initially turned down by the editors of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, on the grounds that it presented too basic a challenge to psychoanalytic theory and thus not appropriately psychoanalytic. After an intervention by Max Gitelson, who argued that the journal should engage itself in ideological censorship, the editorial board reconsidered the paper and eventually published it in 1959.[16][17][18]

In 1960 Kohut published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association an article entitled “Beyond the Bounds of the Basic Rule. Some Recent Contributions to Applied Psychoanalysis.” In it he deals with four psychoanalytic biographic works that had recently been published:

• Phyllis Greenacre: Swift and Carroll, A Psychoanalytic Study of Two Lives (1955);
• Edward Hirschmann: Great Men: Psychoanalytic Studies (1955);
• Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter, (ed.): Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (1955);
• Editha Sterba and Richard Sterba: Beethoven and his Nephew. A Psychoanalytic Study of their Relationship (1954).

With regard to using a psychoanalytic approach to works of art and to the lives of artists, Kohut lists three problems:

• The scholar must have a solid grounding in both psychoanalysis and in the field under study.
• The scholar is doing his study outside the traditional psychoanalytic situation, and thus without the benefit of the free association of the analysand. Furthermore, the person under study may have presented a false self in his artistic creations.
• Often efforts in applied analysis are geared toward demonstrating the importance of psychoanalysis itself, and thus these studies have little relevance in the art form which is being studied and leaves itself open to critique of reductionism.[19][20]

The article entitled “On Courage”, first published posthumously in 1985, is said to have been the most personal one Kohut wrote, with the exception of the article entitled “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z.” He examines here the actions of Franz Jägerstätter, Hans and Sophie Scholl during Hitler’s reign in Germany and their willingness of accept death as their only reward. According to Kohut, these people were not crazy, but “they represented a higher and deeper psychological truth that they reached in their actions. Their values gave them no other choice than to refuse to go along with the demands of the Nazi regime.[21][22][23]

Kohut spoke and wrote on the post-war psychological problems of the German people when he was invited to speak in Frankfurt am Main in October 1969. He was chosen as the laudator when the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade was awarded to Alexander Mitscherlich, with whom Kohut had become acquainted since the 1950s. Mitscherlich was a medical doctor and a psychoanalyst who had written several well received books on Germany’s guilt concerning World War II and the Holocaust. Kohut’s main thesis was that Mitscherlich had applied the “analytic principle of individual cure to the therapeutic transformation of a whole population.” The audience included the President of the Federal Republic of Germany Gustav Heinemann, and the speech was broadcast live to an estimated audience of 20–30 million people.[24][25]

With the exception of such persons as Louis Shapiro and Jerome Kavka, Kohut’s peers were not receptive to his new ideas. However, younger analysts, such as Arnold Goldberg, Michael Franz Basch, Paul Ornstein, Anna Ornstein, Paul Tolpin, Marian Tolpin and Ernest Wolf and in the early days John Gedo were interested in his work, and David Marcus was also involved for a while.

Goldberg eventually emerged as the central figure of the group, whereas Paul Ornstein would become the editor of Kohut’s collected works. Basch was the most original thinker of the group, but he chose to remain on its fringes.

The group met originally in Kohut’s apartment in order to discuss his manuscript of what would become The Analysis of the Self. There were nine such meetings during the spring and early summer of 1969. 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.” In reality this may actually have made the book even more difficult to digest than what it had been prior to the writing of this new first chapter.[27]

Kohut was not a political person. According to his biographer Strozier, Kohut barely noticed the Nazis when they took over Vienna.

In America, he was viewed as a liberal, and he was for state control of gun ownership. He considered the Vietnam War to be immoral and stupid, yet he did not initially understand his son’s anti-war attitude. 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. Eventually Kohut came to see reason in his son’s views, and their anti-Nixon sentiments presumably gave them some common ground.[37]

• How Does Analysis Cure? (1984). Ed. Arnold Goldberg with Paul E. Stepansky. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London. ISBN 0-226-45034-1, ISBN 978-0-226-45034-6
• Self Psychology and the Humanities (1985). Ed. by Charles B. Strozier. W. W. Norton & Co., New York & London. ISBN 0-393-70000-3.
• The Kohut Seminars on Self Psychology and Psychotherapy With Adolescents and Young Adults (1987). Edited by Miriam Elson. W. W. Norton & Co., New York & London. ISBN 0-393-70041-0, ISBN 978-0-393-70041-1.
• The Search for the Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut: 1978–1981. Vol. 3 (1990). Edited by Paul Ornstein. International Universities Press, Madison, Connecticut. ISBN 0-8236-6017-6.
• The Search for the Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut: 1978–1981. Vol. 4 (1991). Edited by Paul Ornstein. International Universities Press, Madison, Connecticut. ISBN 0-8236-6018-4.
• The Curve of Life: Correspondence of Heinz Kohut, 1923–1981 (1994). Edited by Geoffrey Cocks. University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London. ISBN 0-226-11170-9.
• The Chicago Institute Lectures (1996). Edited Paul Tolpin and, Marian Tolpin. The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, N.J. ISBN 0-88163-116-7.

• Arnold Goldberg (ed.): The Psychology of the Self: A Casebook. (1978) International Universities Press, New York. ISBN 0-8236-5582-2.
• Philip F. D. Rubovits-Seitz: Kohut’s Freudian Vision (1999). The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, N.J. and London. ISBN 0-88163-284-8.