Heinz Kohut (; May 3, 1913 – October 8, 1981) was an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst best known for his development of self psychology, an influential school of thought within psychodynamic/psychoanalytic theory which helped transform the modern practice of analytic and dynamic treatment approaches.
Early life Kohut was born on May 3, 1913, in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, to Felix Kohut and Else Kohut (née Lampl). He was the only child of the family. Kohut's parents were assimilated Jews living in Alsergrund, or the Ninth District, who had married two years earlier. His father was an aspiring concert pianist, but abandoned his dreams having been traumatized by his experiences in World War I and moved into business with Paul Bellak. His mother opened her own shop sometime after the war, something that few women did at that time in Vienna. Else's relationship with her son has been described as "narcissistic enmeshment".
Kohut was not enrolled in school until the fifth grade. Before that he was taught by several tutors, a series of "Fräuleins and mademoiselles". Special care was taken that he learn French. From 1924 on he attended the Döblinger Gymnasium in Grinzing, or the 19th District, where the Kohuts built a house. During his time at the school he had one, then he had been isolated from his peers by his mother. At school, a special emphasis was given to the Greek and Latin languages and Greek and Roman literature. Kohut also came to appreciate Goethe, Thomas Mann and Robert Musil.
In 1929, Kohut spent two months in Saint-Quay-Portrieux in Brittany in order to study French. At school he wrote his thesis on Euripides' play The Cyclops. His Latin teacher, who had antisemitic sentiments and later participated in the Austrian Nazi movement, accused him of plagiarism. The thesis was accepted after Kohut's father intervened.
Kohut entered the medical faculty of the University of Vienna in 1932. His studies took six years, during which time he spent six months in internships in Paris, first at the Hôtel-Dieu, and then at the Hôpital Saint-Louis. The latter hospital specialized in the treatment of syphilis, which subjected Kohut to shocking experiences. In Paris, he became acquainted with Jacques Palaci, a Jewish medical student from Istanbul, and paid a visit to him in 1936. The following year, Kohut's father died of leukemia. Sometime after this, Kohut entered psychotherapy with Walter Marseilles, who seems not to have been competent at his profession. Early in 1938, Kohut began psychoanalysis with August Aichhorn, a close friend of Sigmund Freud.
After Austria was annexed to Germany by Hitler on March 12, 1938, the new regime presented difficulties for Kohut, as he still had to take his final exams at the medical faculty. He was eventually allowed to take them after all the Jewish professors had been removed from the university. The Nazis then effectively confiscated all property owned by Jews. The property was sold for much less than its market value, and much of the rest was taken by the state in taxes. Kohut eventually left Austria, landing first in a refugee camp in Kent, England. Many of his relatives who stayed behind were killed in the Holocaust.
In February 1940, Kohut was allowed to travel in a British convoy to Boston, from where he travelled to Chicago by bus. A friend from Vienna, Siegmund Levarie, who had emigrated to live with an uncle in Chicago and who would subsequently become a famous musicologist in the United States, arranged a visa for him and invited him to join him there. Kohut's mother Else also emigrated to Chicago, traveling via Italy. With the money she had smuggled out of Austria, she opened a shop called "De Elsie's".
Early days in Chicago Kohut was able to secure his first position in the South Shore Hospital in Chicago, and in 1941 he began a residency in neurology at the University of Chicago's Billings Hospital, where he lived and worked until 1948. He was board certified in neurology in 1947. Around this time, he apparently decided that he would assume a gentile identity, and chose the Unitarian Church as his denomination.
Kohut was unhappy with neurology, and it seems he was bored in this field. Too much of his time was spent in the laboratory, and there was not enough contact with human emotion.
Career as a psychoanalyst Moving into psychiatry and psychoanalysis 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 also Viennese, 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.
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 people, 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 individuals included Peter Barglow, Michael Franz Basch, George Klumpner and Paul Tolpin.
Teacher of psychoanalysis 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). 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. He believed that if the latter were to be the case, the whole field of psychoanalysis would be assimilated to dynamic psychiatry and disappear forever.
Administrator in psychoanalysis 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 the 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 many of the major figures 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 Anna 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.
After leaving 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.
A writer within psychoanalysis Early articles