Strozier’s Kohut

Review of Charles B. Strozier, Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. ISBN 0374168806; xiii, 495 pp.; $35.00.

Charles Strozier takes the personality of Heinz Kohut (1913-1981) out from behind the shadows of rumor and myth and brings scholarship and cogent argument to illumine the psychoanalytic pioneer’s life, aspects of which he interweaves with Kohut’s theory of the psychology of the self.

As a candidate at the Training and Research Institute of Self Psychology (TRISP) during 1989-1993, I was a student of Strozier and the recipient of his rich stories about Kohut and the evolution of his theories. In self-psychology conferences, I was aware of the extreme idealization of

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Kohut who, it seemed to me, had been draped with the mantle of sainthood. In Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, without devaluing Kohut’s contributions to psychoanalysis, Strozier exposes the imperfections of the charismatic leader. This is a courageous undertaking, particularly for one within the self-psychology “family.”

Professor Strozier combines his gifts as a historian and a psychoanalyst in separating fact from fiction and evolving judicious inferences. He interviewed people who were close to Kohut and studied letters and papers that had been protected from public view for a number of years. Moreover, in the 1970s Strozier was a candidate at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and, in gaining a place in an outer ring of Kohut’s group, he observed the working of his charisma.

The book is divided into five parts. Strozier not only chronicles Kohut’s life from birth to death but also presents detailed expositions of Kohut’s books — The Analysis of the Self (1971), The Restoration of the Self (1977), and the posthumously published How Does Analysis Cure? (1984) — as well as of a number of his papers on empathy, narcissism, narcissistic rage, charisma, and other topics, some of which were included in Self Psychology and the Humanities (1985), edited and with an introduction by Strozier.

In Part One, 1913-1939, Strozier reviews the history of Kohut’s parents and grandparents and of Heinz’s early life and adolescence in Vienna. Describing him as one “raised in an assimilated Jewish family imbued with European high culture” (p. ix), Strozier characterizes Heinz’s first year as positive, with mirroring provided by his loving parents, Felix and Else. However, Heinz lost access to his father for the next four years as Felix left home to fight in World War I. This traumatic loss changed Kohut’s life forever.

Strozier reconstructs Kohut’s childhood from material contained in “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z.” Kohut wrote the paper in 1977 presumably as a case study of his patient, “Mr. Z.” According to Kohut, the first analysis was conducted when he was still a classical analyst, adhering to Freudian constructs and techniques. Another analysis was undertaken, however, because the patient needed more treatment. In the second analysis, Kohut, who had been evolving the psychology of the self, was thinking differently about the implications of narcissistic transferences. Unlike the first analysis, the second effected a “cure,” and this paper was presented by Kohut as indicative of the efficacy of self-psychology. Strozier offers considerable data to substantiate his belief that this paper is autobiographical, that is, that “Mr. Z.” is Heinz Kohut.

Inferences about the pathology of Kohut’s mother, Else, and her toxic influence on Kohut’s personality is derived from the “Mr. Z.” paper. A flavor of Strozier’s approach and thinking can be gleaned from the following narrative:

… that the most powerful and enduring influence in his life was Else.… She was a corrosive presence in his own sense of self.… It took a huge effort for him to establish his separateness from her, to escape from the long shadow cast, to find his own true center of authenticity. The father, in turn, was first absent and then no substitute in the crucial years; just when Heinz truly connected with him as a young man, he died. It is all there in “Mr. Z.,” just as it was in his life. The struggle is imbedded. (p. 18)

During childhood, as each of his parents went his and her own way, satisfying their personal needs and, in effect, abandoning their son, Heinz had a close relationship with a tutor named Ernst Morawetz. In addition to sharing cultural and intellectual pursuits, Heinz and Ernst engaged in homosexual activities over a two-year period. Heinz was 10 or 11 at the time; Morawetz, a university student, was between 19 and 23. We are told that this tie, although sexualized, provided the lonely Heinz with the emotional connection that he needed and craved.

Strozier takes care to note that today we would term his attachment as involving childhood sexual abuse, but he bows to Kohut’s interpretation that the relationship was primarily an “affectionate” one in which sex was incidental. In addition, it claimed that Heinz’s connection to the tutor contributed to the boy’s well-being as well as to Kohut’s later theories about empathy and the self. Years later, as Strozier informs us, Kohut’s first application for psychoanalytic training was rejected presumably because of his “fluid sexual boundaries.” (p. 80) Moreover, Kohut is described as having had close relationships with male friends, but as having been “asexual” with women. Kohut did marry, and he fathered a son. We are left to wonder if Kohut’s having been sexually abused contributed to his problems with boundaries and whether he was conscious about the matter.

Strozier establishes the undeniable fact that

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Kohut was a Jew and yet for most of his adult life Kohut behaved as though he were a Christian. No explanation is offered for Kohut’s obfuscating his Jewish identity, except that Strozier characterizes him as having a “deeply conflicted and split-off attitude toward his own identity.… His psychological style … was highly dissociated.” (p. 39)

Part One concludes with Kohut, having been awarded the MD from the University of Vienna, departing from the Nazi-occupied city after the Anschluss. His leaving followed soon after Freud’s.

Parts Two (1939-1965) and Three (1965-1970) focus on Kohut’s becoming a psychoanalyst, originally as a Freudian and then, later, beginning to formulate his own theories; forming a self psychology group in Chicago; and writing his first book, The Analysis of the Self. The author presents a cogent analysis of Kohut’s early theories, explains how these compare with those of Freud, and he includes the analysts in Kohut’s circle and the well-known theorists of the period in his extensive historical survey of the world of psychoanalysis.

In Part Four, 1971-1977, which covers the period when Kohut learned that he had cancer, Strozier shows that Kohut tried to hide his terminal illness, presumably a blow to his fantasy of his invincibility, and opines that knowing that he had a limited life span spurred Kohut’s efforts to elucidate his ideas. During this period, there was confirmation of Else’s psychosis and this seemed to play a role in unlocking Kohut’s creativity. Else died in 1972.

In Part Five, 1977-1981, Strozier covers a variety of topics including the subject of heroes and gurus, the facts and suppositions surrounding the paper, “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z.,” Kohut’s ideas about God and religion, and some insightful thoughts on the healing of psychoanalysis.

The author makes clear that although Kohut had a remarkable capacity for empathy as a clinician, he was grossly narcissistic. Eschewing idealization, Strozier describes Kohut’s narcissistically-disturbed personality, indicated by his self-centeredness, arrogance, demand for attention that sometimes bordered on the obnoxious, never apologizing for his rage, and his need to dominate and control.

The extent of Kohut’s narcissistic disturbances raises a question about his awareness of his personality issues. Strozier does not address this question. However, he does not disappoint in elucidating how Kohut’s early experiences and personal psychology influenced his theories. He argues that extrapolation from his own experience led Kohut to “insights about empathy, narcissism, the self object, grandiosity, idealization, sexuality, self-state dreams, and many other constructs” and states that “To know the actual Else deepens one’s understanding of Kohut’s explanation for the development of splits in the self as a result of failures of mirroring.” (p. 260) In addition, Strozier shows that Kohut’s self-reference included gendered schema in which men and women act roles from his own private script” (p. 262), “Kohut’s mothers … have the quality of an evil archetype” (p. 264), and he “makes homosexual [in acts, real or imagined] family dynamics paradigmatic of the culture” (p. 265).

This is a thought-provoking book. The implications of a narcissistically-disturbed and dissociative Kohut — particularly with regard to his “protean sexuality” and “identity confusion” — left me with unpleasant feelings, even doubts about some of his clinical observations. I wonder, for example, if Kohut’s attitude about childhood sexual abuse fell within the realm of material that was dissociated, its meaning disavowed. If so, how this emotional blindness might have affected his clinical judgment about abuse.

Because Strozier’s book invites questions and inspires truth-seeking, it warrants recognition as a ground-breaking work. Hopefully, these revelations will spur more thought not only about how Kohut’s psychopathology may have influenced and, perhaps, skewed his clinical observations and theories but, also, how he evolved his theories in spite of his psychology. The self-psychology movement has matured sufficiently, I believe, that we can tolerate the questions.

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