Heinz Kohut
Psychoanalyst
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
An incisive biography of the founder of "self psychology" -- a key movement in American psychology -- and one of the greatest analysts since Freud.
Heinz Kohut was at the center of the twentieth-century psychoanalytic movement. After fleeing his native Vienna when the Nazis took power there, he settled in Chicago and worked in its university; within a decade he became the leader of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, a site for some of the most important research and clinical practice in the field.
The years after World War II were the halcyon days of American psychoanalysis, which thrived as one analyst after another expanded upon Freud's insights. But, in time, the discipline's gradually eroding humanism began to trouble analysts and patients alike. Kohut, America's most powerful and prestigious analyst, was also one of the first to recognize the limits of classical psychoanalysis. His work brought the self into new focus and helped create psychotherapy as we know it today.
In this biography, Charles B. Strozier shows us Kohut as a paradigmatic figure in American intellectual life: a charismatic man whose ideas enriched many, but one who could be unbearably self-centered and grandiose. He brings to his telling of Kohut's life all the tools of an analyst -- intelligence, erudition, empathy, contrary insight, and a willingness to look far below the surface.
"Strozier navigates this complicated material with skill and sensitivity, never reducing his complex subject to a case study, in a work that will appeal to a small but dedicated audience." - Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Developments in psychoanalysis are, appropriately, often the products of half-discovered impulses and longings, so it's fitting that Kohut's The Analysis of the Self, which essentially invented and delineated relational psychoanalysis, was the product of many conflicting influences. This new, definitive biography not only records Kohut's illustrious career, but gives fresh insights and reflections upon his work. Born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Vienna in 1913, Kohut grew up with an intrusive mother, had an affair with his male tutor when he was 12, structured his sexual life around masochistic fantasies and studied to be a physician until he fled Austria in 1939 and moved to the U.S. Here, he became well known as a psychiatrist, and then as a psychoanalyst, reaching full bloom in 1971 with the publication of The Analysis of the Self. Strozier (Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America) has produced a sympathetic narrative of Kohut's life and work, but avoids the pitfalls of hagiography. He addresses Kohut's sexual ambivalence (including a close, lifelong friendship with conductor Robert Wadsworth) and his tormented relationship with his Jewishness, which ran so deep that Kohut was known to cause scenes in kosher restaurants by insisting on being served a ham sandwich and a glass of milk. Strozier navigates this complicated material with skill and sensitivity, never reducing his complex subject to a case study, in a work that will appeal to a small but dedicated audience.
