Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst - Softcover

Strozier, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590511026 ISBN 13: 9781590511022

Publisher: Other Press, 2004

Synopsis

Heinz Kohut (1913-1981) stood at the center of the twentieth-century psychoanalytic movement. After fleeing his native Vienna when the Nazis took power, he arrived in Chicago, where he spent the rest of his life. He became the most creative figure in the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, and is now remembered as the founder of 'self psychology,' whose emphasis on empathy sought to make Freudian psychoanalysis less neutral.

Kohut's life invited complexity. He obfuscated his identity as a Jew, negotiated a protean sexuality, and could be surprisingly secretive about his health and other matters. In this biography, Charles Strozier shows Kohut as a paradigmatic figure in American intellectual life: a charismatic man whose ideas embodied the hope and confusions of a country still in turmoil. Inherent in his life and formulated in his work were the core issues of modern America.

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. The gradual erosion of the discipline's humanism, however, began to trouble clinicians and patients alike. Heinz Kohut took the lead in the creation of the first authentically home-grown psychoanalytic movement. It took an emigre be so distinctly American.

Strozier brings to his telling of Kohut's life all the tools of a skillful analyst: intelligence, erudition, empathy, contrary insight, and a willingness to look far below the surface.

About this title

About the Author

Charles B. Strozier

Charles B. Strozier is a professor of history at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Training and Research Institute for Self Psychology (TRISP). He is the author of Lincoln's Quest for Union: A Psychological Portrait and Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

From 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.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Other Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1590511026
• ISBN 13: 9781590511022
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 538