Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst

Abstract

For an adherent of self psychology to write an unflinchingly critical biography of the admired founder of the movement is a major creative feat of empathy and scholarship, a feat that Charles B. Strozier has accomplished. While he valorizes Heinz Kohut, Strozier does not hesitate to relate his selfishness and narcissism, his lies and deceptions, his “protean sexuality” and “apparently fluid sexual boundaries.” The book explains the concepts of self psychology, including the “self,” the self object, and the idealizing and mirroring transferences, in clear English. Strozier has contempt for Freudian drive theory, terming it “absurd” and “ridiculous.” Since all psychological models are constructs and metaphors used as heuristic devices to elucidate clinical material, why not allow for pluralism and relativism in clinical theory? Drive theory may be a model of choice for some behaviors. Strozier spends a great deal of energy defending Kohut's originality against suggestions that some of his insights were derived from Donald Winnicott, Sandor Ferenczi, Erik Erikson, Carl Rogers, Carl Jung, and others. Of course all authors build on the shoulders of those who have worked before them. Strozier does not acknowledge the psychoanalytic theorist Paul Federn, who as early as the 1920s developed the idea of an autonomous narcissistic line of development and the distinction between healthy and pathological narcissism; for example: “Although narcissism was first recognized in its pathological form, it is unquestionably not a pathological residue of the past but the normal essential means for establishing the living psychic coherence of the ego” (Paul Federn, “On the Distinction between Healthy and Pathological Narcissism,” 1929).