Fearing the Theoretical Other: The Legacy of Kohut’s Erasure of the Analyst’s Trauma

Abstract

Recently, a number of psychoanalytic authors have begun to chart new territory in understanding the ways in which the Holocaust has impacted theory construction since World War II. In these new works, it has been shown that through their own denial, dissociation, neglect, and disavowal, European émigré analysts and their followers created a theory that was remarkably silent about trauma in general, and the analyst’s experience of trauma in particular. This article seeks to examine the ways in which Heinz Kohut’s struggle with his own Holocaust trauma may have influenced and may continue to influence self psychology today. Specifically, it examines Kohut’s reluctance to allow for social, and hence, possibly traumatizing, real world events to impact the individual and particularly the analyst in his theory construction.