Heinz Kohut and the Psychology of the Self

Allen M. Siegel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134883929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Heinz Kohut's work represents an important departure from the Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis. A founder of the Self Psychology movement in America, he based his practice on the belief that narcissistic vulnerabilities play a significant part in the suffering that brings people for treatment. Written predominantly for a psychoanalytic audience Kohut's work is often difficult to interpret. Siegel uses examples from his own practice to show how Kohut's innovative theories can be applied to other forms of treatment.

Chapter 1

The Viennese Chicagoan

Ernest S. Wolf

[P]sychoanalysis, this new sun among the sciences of man, will shed its understanding warmth and its explaining light.

(Kohut 1973, p. 684)

I

I begin these biographical comments with some disclaimers. To write about Heinz Kohut is both easy and exceedingly difficult. Perhaps this is true for any friend who undertakes to tell something of the story of another. It is easy to focus on one’s own experiences and let what one knows firsthand be the guide. With a reasonable degree of candor and serious attempts at objectivity one may succeed in painting a lively picture that yet remains a very limited and personal view. Heinz Kohut loved to talk to his friends and students, expressing opinions about all sorts of things. At the same time he remained a very private, even secretive, person, who hid his own past in a fog of generalities. To date no one has published a scholarly biography, nor is the time ripe to reopen old wounds and rekindle the barely banked fires of controversy. The reader of this little essay, therefore, must be satisfied with a quickly passing glance at one of the major innovators of twentieth-century psychological science by someone who was perhaps stationed too close to be able to get a comprehensive overview. In keeping with the spirit of Kohutian self psychological psychoanalysis I will avoid categorical objective judgments in favor of letting the experiencing of evolving interactions prevail.

The first time I met Heinz Kohut I was waiting at an elevator on the upper of two floors occupied by the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. The Institute was still at its old address, 664 North Michigan Avenue, I was still in analysis with Charles Kligerman, so it must have been in the late 1950s. A group of us, patients and candidates, were waiting to leave on the next elevator going down. A youngish man, slim, well dressed, of very serious mien, asked whether we were going to the next floor below or whether we were headed out of the building on the ground floor. He indicated that it would be all right to use the elevator to go to the ground floor but to descend just a single floor one should walk via the stairway. I was taken aback. I had never met Heinz Kohut before but knew who he was and of his reputation as one of the best teachers at the Institute. ‘Who is he to tell us whether we can use the elevator or not?’ I thought. I did not like this man who seemed so ascetic and disciplined, so Teutonic and commanding. At the time I was deep into my second analysis but still recovering from the painful humiliations suffered at the words and silences of Maxwell Gitelson, my first analyst.

In retrospect, my initial response to Kohut was colored both by some residual transference to Gitelson and, as a refugee from Hitler’s Reich, by a gut reaction of anxiety toward and hatred of anything German. And that included Austrian. At the time I had not yet fully recovered from the experience of growing up as a Jew in Hitler’s Germany and I was still neurotically afraid of anything German. I did not know then that both Kohut’s parents were Jewish, albeit secular. Indeed, though Heinz and I later became good friends, especially after I joined the circle of admiring students of self psychology in the late 1960s, I did not learn about his Jewish ancestry until later. Over the years I got to know him very well but I never thought of him as Jewish. Jewish culture, Jewish food, Jewish jokes were alien to him. Growing up in a family that had been totally assimilated, he did not think of himself as a Jew. But the Nazis did, and that forced him to leave Austria. Even though my own Jewish identity has never been questioned by myself or by others, it has presented me with enough serious problems to make it quite easy for me to understand that one might not want to call attention to one’s Jewish lineage.

When Kohut arrived in Chicago he already had a medical degree from the University of Vienna. At the University of Chicago Hospitals he began a residency in neurology under Richard Richter, who was the renowned chairman of the department. To be one of Richter’s residents was a recognition of achievement and of great promise. It is understandable that some of Kohut’s friends shook their heads in sad disappointment when he left this position to become a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalysis.

Kohut seemed a strange mixture of aloof, aristocratic and almost puritanical austerity in a warmly responsive and considerate person. He was a very private person and was careful how he let himself appear in public. I never saw him sloppily dressed and I know that he corrected and edited his writings again and again before he was satisfied to release them for publication. He was properly discreet about his health, and few of his friends knew that during the last decade of his life he was suffering from a chronic leukemia in remission. Long before the contemporary popularity of exercise and jogging, Kohut ran, not jogged, his prescribed miles several times a week. He ate sparingly to maintain a trim figure.

Yet dinners at the home of Heinz and Betty were grand celebrations of gourmet cuisine. Heinz was a connoisseur of fine wines. The evening usually began with some special Moselle while chatting before dinner, sometimes by a crackling fire in the living room. Dinner itself was graced by a vintage Burgundy or Bordeaux that fitted the occasion. For dessert he might serve a vintage Sauternes or a Spätlese Rhein or Moselle. Betty was famous for her delicious Sacher Torte, prepared according to a secret recipe which she never divulged. However, the wines were what mattered most to Heinz. He taught me to be careful when pouring into a wineglass, not too much, just about half full. He proudly showed me a letter from his good friend Heinz Hartmann, in fact Hartmann’s last letter to Kohut, written shortly before Hartmann died. In this letter Hartmann laments the discomforts of aging but then points out that there are pleasant compensations when growing old: the wines one drinks get better and better. Kohut’s ardent appreciation of wine helped, also, in making me feel more at home when a guest at Heinz and Betty’s. Having grown up in the Rhineland I was used to a glass of good Rhine or Moselle wine on most festive occasions at home. Even as children we were allowed a little sip of wine, which made us children feel part of the whole warm family ambience, even though we did not really like the taste.

Dinners at the Kohuts’ were a little like that. Heinz had collected around himself a group of younger colleagues whom he met regularly for discussion of his work in progress and sometimes for dinner. In part the formation of this group was a reaction to Kohut’s experience of being cold-shouldered by his former friends and colleagues, especially the leadership of the American Psychoanalytic Association, as he began to talk about and publish his ideas about narcissism and the self. He mentioned to me some colleagues who knew him well but who ignored him now when he met them walking through the hotel lobby at some national meeting. Old friends suddenly looked past him or answered his greetings only coldly and curtly when crossing his path. He felt hurt and angry. Kohut had been a President of the American Psychoanalytic Association and a Vice-President of the International Psychoanalytic Association. He had been part of the circle around Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann, and for a time he was expected to be the next President of the International. Among the candidates at the Chicago Institute he was highly respected for teaching the best theory course and writing the most interesting papers. I recall, when I was still a candidate, hearing him discuss with our class his recently published ‘Forms and Transformations of Narcissism’ (1966), which opened new psychoanalytic vistas for many of us. Almost all candidates thought that he was one of the best teachers at the Institute. His course in psychoanalytic theory was conducted by him at the most sophisticated level. We had our reading assignments and he would start by asking us a few questions about our understanding of what we had read. A few questions back and forth between Kohut and the class and then he would be off on a lengthy discussion of some point that had just been raised. We then sat there, listening, all ears, as the intricate theoretical mysteries of psychoanalysis were revealed to us. Once started on such a topic he could go on and on, maybe for half an hour or more, and he did not like to be interrupted. I was both fascinated and astounded by his tremendous knowledge. In short, he was thought by all of us as the intellectual leader of modern psychoanalysis, as Mr. Psychoanalysis.

All that respect and admiration changed rather suddenly with the emergence of self psychology. For example, after a scientific meeting at which Kohut had emphasized Breuer’s and Anna O’s great contribution to the creation of psychoanalysis by Freud, he was condemned for not being properly laudatory of Freud, and, within a few weeks, he was removed from the Psychoanalytic Education Council of the Chicago Institute by a vote of his colleagues! He began to feel professionally isolated. Psychologically he needed an affirming responsiveness. Earlier, after he had begun writing his first book, Analysis of the Self, he started to have meetings with a number of interested young analysts to discuss the emerging book chapter by chapter. I believe that initially the group consisted of Michael Basch, John Gedo, Arnold Goldberg, David Marcus, Paul Tolpin and, from Cincinnati, Paul Ornstein. Later I was asked to join in, and then also Marian Tolpin and Anna Ornstein.

I was both awed and excited by the privilege of being present during the creative spurts of a genius. I thought of Heinz Kohut as the new Freud and of our meetings as worthy successors to the Wednesday night meetings of the early Vienna group in Freud’s house. Looking around the room I would fantasize that so-and-so was the contemporary Abraham, the other was Ferenczi, and so on. John Gedo was a leading spirit among us, and he also seemed closest to Kohut. After the publication of Analysis of the Self in 1971 there had not been a public lecture by Kohut for some time and John and I wondered about an appropriate forum for a lecture-presentation for him. Kohut would be sixty years old in another year and, in my naiveté, I assumed that the psychoanalytic community would wish to honor him by celebrating the event. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. At the time I happened to be on the Program Committee of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society. When the Committee met I therefore proposed that the Society sponsor a scientific meeting to honor our renowned colleague Heinz Kohut on his sixtieth birthday. This was not received with great enthusiasm but it was decided to bring up the suggestion at a regular meeting of the whole Society. Colleague after colleague got up to denounce my proposal. Indeed, there was no precedent for anyone’s birthday being honored by the Society and my initiative was soundly and, as I now see, justifiably rejected. Even in retrospect I do not clearly understand what made me expect the members of the Society to wish to honor someone whom they envied and whose ideas threatened them in their comfortable certainties.

However, I was not ready to give up and I felt righteously outraged at the shortsightedness of my fellow Society members. Carried forward by my enthusiastic idolization I decided to organize with my friends a scientific meeting to honor Heinz Kohut. Together with Paul Tolpin and George Pollock, who as Director of the Institute gave us his blessings, we formed a committee (well assisted by my wife Ina) to arrange the Birthday Conference. Since we needed seed money to get started I personally importuned a dozen or so friends for a loan of about $150 each with the promise that, if possible, they would be repaid after the Conference. We engaged space for scientific presentations and for a banquet at a local hotel. We planned a high-level scientific program with speakers from Europe as well as North America. Heinz took an active part in planning the program. I cannot remember all the invitees nor their topics but among them were the historian Carl Schorske from Princeton University, who spoke about Freud’s Vienna; Paul Parin, psychoanalyst and anthropologist from Switzerland; Lawrence Friedman from New York, who spoke about psychoanalytic theory; Mary Gedo, who spoke on art and psychoanalysis; Alexander Mitscherlich, leader in the postwar revival of psychoanalysis in Germany, from Frankfurt. John Gedo gave the laudation at the banquet. The Kohut Birthday Conference was a great success scientifically and personally. Nearly 600 people, friends and colleagues, from all over the world attended. René Spitz came from Denver. Anna Freud, who was unable to attend, sent a warm letter of congratulations from London. She was among the honorary sponsors, who included also the Mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley. Even after repaying the seed money loans, the conference had a surplus that was donated to the Institute.

The Kohuts had a warm ongoing friendship with Anna Freud. When visiting Chicago Anna Freud would stay with Heinz and Betty. On one of these occasions Betty Kohut admired an amber necklace worn by Anna Freud. On the last day of her visit, just before leaving the Kohuts, Miss Freud took off her necklace and put it around Betty’s neck as a gift. Later, when Heinz had sent a copy of the manuscript of Analysis of the Self to her in London, he received a somewhat equivocal but encouraging reply. The friendship survived the strains introduced by Kohut’s theoretical innovations, as did the friendship with K.R. Eissler. There were frequent exchanges of gifts around birthdays and holidays but as time went on there was no longer any mention of psychoanalysis or Heinz’s newer contributions. His work had become taboo among his closest friends.

Some decades earlier, when the Eisslers were still in Chicago, Heinz had been in analysis with Ruth Eissler. His first analysis, in Vienna, had been with August Aichhorn. He always spoke warmly about Aichhorn. After I published one of my early self psychologically influenced papers, ‘Ambience and Abstinence’, in 1976, I was rewarded by Heinz with the gift of a photograph of a very young Heinz Kohut sitting at a desk with Aichhorn, the two looking at a manuscript together. The inscription on the back of the photograph reads ‘With Aichhorn in 1937 – lots of ambience and little abstinence. For Ernie from Heinz, October, 1976.’ Aichhorn, the author of Wayward Youth, was one of the very first analysts who was able to understand and therefore to deal successfully with the delinquency of adolescents. When treating young people he fostered their idealization of himself and then used this intense idealizing transference as a lever for exerting psychotherapeutic influence. I have always wondered whether Kohut derived some of his own ideas about the importance of the idealizing transference from his contact with Aichhorn, though of course Kohut did not manipulate the idealizing transference, he analyzed it. He told one anecdote from his own treatment with Aichhorn. Apparently as a youngster Heinz had been a very well-behaved, ‘good’ boy, and in his analysis his ‘goodness’ somehow drove Aichhorn into impatient irritation until he finally burst out, ‘Heinz, I wish I could inject some delinquent’s serum into you!’ Though Kohut never mentioned her to me, another patient of Aichhorn, Margaret Mahler, also became a leader and innovator in psychoanalysis.

When Kohut heard that Freud was leaving Vienna he went to the station to wave good-bye and he was rewarded by Freud tipping his hat to him. I think that was the only time Kohut saw Freud, but he loved to tell the story. I believe he felt in Freud’s gesture a symbolic passing of the torch. Sometime in 1938, after Freud’s leaving, Kohut also left Vienna. After a year in Britain he came to Chicago, encouraged by his good friend Siegmund Levarie, the music scholar, who was then at the University of Chicago. Kohut greatly enjoyed music and was a regular at Chicago symphony concerts as well as the opera. His father had been a fine pianist who had contemplated a concert career until military service during World War I put an end to his musical ambitions. Heinz’s fondness for and involvement with music was well known to us. On one occasion, we, the group of his younger colleagues, gave Heinz a set of the complete recordings of the Bach cantatas which he then listened to, one by one, a cantata every evening.

Despite the cold rejection of Kohut’s ideas by most of his generation of psychoanalysts there was a beginning burgeoning of interest in self psychology among younger psychoanalysts and among analytically oriented psychotherapists. Kohut believed that his theoretical writings, though amply provided with case vignettes, needed to be supported by a collection of extensive illustrative case histories. All of us in the circle of colleagues around him were accumulating clinical experience. Under the leadership of John Gedo we organized ourselves into writing a book consisting of case histories and their full discussion within the new frame of self psychology. We met at regular intervals at the Institute with Kohut and discussed our cases with his participation. It was a unique and most valuable learning experience for every one of us, truly a masterclass at the feet of the master. Each case was discussed at length so that we could decide about its possible inclusion in the forthcoming casebook. Being scrutinized by one’s closest colleagues is not a pleasant experience and it led to some tensions within the group. Usually these were dissipated by Kohut’s summarizing comments, but in one instance there was no possibility of resolution and, as a consequence, John Gedo withdrew from the group. The casebook project was continued under Arnold Goldberg’s energetic leadership and published under the title The Psychology of the Self: A Casebook (1978).

The last decade of Kohut’s life was characterized by both professional satisfaction and the anguish of personal affliction. The first Annual Self Psychology Conference in Chicago in 1978 was well attended, with over 500 registrants. It set a pattern for an unbroken series of annual Self Psychology Conferences with high-level scientific programs. At the time of this writing I am looking forward to the Eighteenth Annual Conference to be held in San Francisco in October 1995. Heinz was an active participant until his death at age sixty-eight in 1981. He died in Chicago just three days after giving his final address, which was to the Fourth Self Psychology Conference at Berkeley.

In retrospect one wonders about the wellspring of Kohut’s originality and its final focus on narcissism. I would speculate that his creativeness was a compensatory response to some early deprivations that had threatened the cohesiveness of his budding self. One major deprivation was the absence of his father during World War I. I do not know the exact dates for his father’s military service, but Kohut had been born in May 1913. For Kohut’s father the war had been a catastrophic interruption of his career as a concert pianist and he was unable to pursue his musical aims after he returned. One can easily imagine the father’s depression and the son’s disillusionment in the now returned father, who must have been a distantly admired hero during his military service. But the father’s musical interest was reflected many decades later in some of the most original essays on music written by Kohut together with his friend Siegmund Levarie.

Little Heinz was close to his mother and he remained so for many years. Yet certain remarks that he made at times left me with the impression that his mother was a somewhat distant woman who was overly involved with her social life, leaving Heinz in the care of servants and tutors. I speculate that his parents must have had some social aspirations that included melding into the upper bourgeoisie. We know now that the Wittgensteins and others had accomplished assimilation into the dominant culture with remarkable success, and I wonder whether the Kohuts had similar aims. (It may be that the remarkable flowering of individual creativeness within the newly assimilated group may well be a self-asserti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Viennese Chicagoan
• 2 The classical foundation of Kohut’s thought
• 3 Early papers: emerging strands of a new cloth
• 4 Toward a psychology of the self
• 5 Analysis of the Self: Part I, The idealized parental imago
• 6 Analysis of the Self: Part II, The grandiose self
• 7 The Restoration of the Self: Part I, Innovations in theory
• 8 The Restoration of the Self: Part II, Clinical considerations
• 9 The two analyses of Mr. Z
• 10 How Does Analysis Cure?: Part I, Theoretical reflections
• 11 How Does Analysis Cure?: Part II, The therapeutic process reconsidered
• 12 Last words
• 13 Critique and conclusions
• Glossary
• Chronology
• Bibliography of the work of Heinz Kohut
• General bibliography
• Index