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KOHUT, HEINZ 1913-1981

CREATOR OF SELF-PSYCHOLOGY

A Challenge to Freud

According to Sigmund Freud, the Oedipus complex—a boy's aggressive impulse against the adult father and love for the mother, accompanied by castration fear—is the central conflict in a child's development. Nonresolution of this complex could lead to neurotic behavior in the adult. Heinz Kohut, the creator of a new body of analytic theory called self-psychology, focused instead on the narcissist—the person whose vital mental health dimension of self-love has gone amiss. His new explanations and treatment of the narcissist's problems bypassed the Oedipus stage and caused conflicts in the psychoanalytic community.

Formative Years

As the German son of a Jewish father and Roman Catholic mother during the Hitler era, Kohut was forced to flee Vienna under Nazi racial laws. He traveled first to Britain, then to the United States, where he became a leading practitioner and teacher of Freudian theory. Kohut believed it was the disruption of his life in Germany and Austria and the challenge to his love of Germanic culture that made him "alert to the problems of the fragmented personality and how it tries to cure itself."

A New Treatment

Self-psychology was a new method of treating this fragmented, narcissistic personality. Kohut's first book, The Analysis of the Self (1971), contradicted orthodox psychoanalysis which held that the narcissistic character disorder was resistant to psychoanalytic treatment. Traditional psychoanalysts believed that the inability of the narcissist to form attachments to others originated in an infant's preverbal relationships with his parents. Since these interactions occurred before a child could talk, psychoanalysts thought they were inaccessible to a talking cure. Kohut felt that narcissistic disorders derived from a failure in parental empathy instead of an unresolved Oedipus complex. Patient and analyst could, therefore, explore together what happened in the patient's early childhood to reach a new understanding of his flawed early parental relationship. The patient then could become more able to regulate his own self-esteem.

A Bold Challenge

Kohut's second book, The Restoration of the Self (1977), was an even-bolder challenge to Freud's ideas and led to his alienation from the analytic establishment. Before he challenged orthodox theory Kohut recalled, "I was Mr. Psychoanalysis. In every room I entered there were smiles. Now, everybody looks away. I've rocked the boat." In Kohut's new treatment there was less struggle with the patient than in traditional analysis. Critics felt that some struggles were necessary and that Kohut avoided them. They accused him of neglecting the angry, aggressive dimension of personality disorders.

Growing Interest

Even with all the controversy, interest in Kohut's work grew. Many from the psychoanalytic community agreed that narcissism was at the frontier of psychiatry. Traditional psychoanalysis consisting of long-term expensive treatment was being challenged by the growing popularity of other shorter, less arduous, and less expensive treatments of emotional disorders, many of which derived from Kohut. The 1979 meeting of the American Psychological Association in New York was crammed with hundreds of analysts trying to get a view of Kohut, and conferences on self-psychology in other cities attracted large crowds. Kohut, the analyst of narcissism, had become a celebrity.