Searching for Traces of the Holocaust in Heinz Kohut’s Thought (article)

The psychic specters of war and genocide cast their shadows upon postwar psychoanalytic writing. They influenced ideas of the object and subject, especially accounts of the representation of self and the other and theories about the self’s fragmentation, destruction, and abjection. Dislocated psychoanalysts who fled Nazi Europe attempted to understand an aspect of humanity to which Freud was not exposed. Freud, who died on September 23, 1939 neither knew about nor imagined the Final Solution, which annihilated whole communities and cultures. Raanan Kulka, in the introduction to How Does Analysis Cure?, suggested that writing about per-

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sonal fragmenting processes is one of the ways in which psychoanalysts coped ethically (albeit implicitly) with the war’s tragedy that exposed the fragmentation of the person from his/her humanness (in Hebrew, 2005, 14). Psychoanalysis after the war, according to Kulka, engaged with the core of human evil. It delved into the death instinct’s external expressions, such as murderous and aggressive behavior, and looked at a type of relatedness that is based on estrangement and a lack of personal responsibility.

Yet the acknowledgment of the war and the Holocaust’s implications has been avoided and repressed, creating a gap in the psychoanalytic literature that echoes the silence in other disciplines (Elisabeth Glaser, “From Vienna to Chicago: Heinz Kohut’s Flight from the Holocaust,” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 7, 3, 2010, 246-258). The destruction-discourse about internalized objects (objects are “loved ones” in the language of psychoanalysis) within post-Freudian theories echoes and elaborates upon the destruction that characterized World War II. Postwar psychoanalysts have thus far dealt with this destruction in an indirect manner within the context of individual life stories. The foundational creators of the British Middle School, Neo-Freudian and relational analysts generally avoided writing directly about WWII or the Holocaust, turning instead to examine the development and interaction of the self and other.

One of the most influential psychoanalysts who theorized about fragmentation processes is Heinz Kohut (1913-81). A dislocated Austrian, Kohut fled Europe in March 1939 and emigrated to Chicago. His personal life experience between and after two world wars contributed to the development of his theory of the self and, in particular, the concept of fragmentation. One central concept that Heinz Kohut contributed to psychoanalysis is that of the “selfobject.” (Kohut referred to the “self-object” in his earlier writings, but then dropped the hyphen.) According to Kohut’s biographer Charles Strozier, “Kohut was concerned with the self and its meanings, with the enduring connections we have with others and the ways we take them in (what he called the selfobject milieu), with the profound effects of traumatic disruptions in that milieu” (Strozier, 2007: 409, “Heinz Kohut and the Meanings of Identity,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 43: 399-410). The concept “selfobject” provides a way of talking in intrapsychic language about the effect of benevolent others in one’s life and their importance to one’s well-being. The absence of adequate selfobjects

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may lead to self-fragmentation—the deterioration of the person’s state of mind and psyche under intense anxiety, the feeling of breaking into pieces (zerbrochen in Yiddish) as Ernest Wolf, one of Kohut’s early followers and students, once suggested when I struggled to understand the origin of Kohut’s ideas of fragmentation. He added that in order to be a human being one must have someone being human for her/him in the formative periods of life (Ernest Wolf, personal communication, 2009, 2014).

Kohut experienced three main phases of his life in which either the precursor or the actual feeling of fragmentation was present. In his childhood, the propensity to fragment and his relationship to his selfobjects formed. The second period was initiated by the trauma that Kohut experienced under the Nazi regime in Austria and allowed his earlier vulnerability to fragmentation to manifest itself. The third period of fragmentation occurred during the period of his perceived break with Freud, in light of his intense theoretical relationship with Sigmund and his friendship with Anna, which played a role in his alienation (Schneider, Broken Self: Psychobiographical Explorations of Heinz Kohut’s Concept of Fragmentation, Clinical Research Project, Illinois School of Professional Psychology, 2011). Given the fragmentation he experienced throughout his life, perhaps it is not surprising that the Holocaust is mentioned in passing but ignored in practice despite its deep connection to his theory of fragmentation.

In what follows I will focus on the second period of fragmentation. Kohut maintained an uneasy public-private dichotomy when negotiating the issues of the Holocaust and Judaism. He wrote and talked publicly about the perpetrators, but he was more implicit and elliptical about the victims. In the Kohut Archive at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, a letter from Judith Kestenberg asks Kohut whether a patient in his book is a child of Holocaust survivors. Kohut avoided answering directly, instead suggesting that they talk about the matter on the phone (Judith S. Kestenberg to Kohut, December 14, 1977). In their phone conversation he denied any connection of the case to the Holocaust. Strozier writes, “Some have criticized Kohut for what they consider an unconscious avoidance of this issue that may be related to his personal ambivalence about his own Jewish identity” (Strozier, Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, 2001, 202).

The effects of the trauma of World War II can be seen in Kohut’s writing about the fragmentation process in his understand-

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ing of the destruction of the person, as well as the destruction of the image of the other. He experienced the Anschluss (the German annexation of Austria); the pogrom of Crystal Night on November 9-10, 1938, in Vienna; and the loss of many people he knew well, both relatives and friends. In the Kohut Archive, a letter sheds light on Kohut’s experience during the Nazi takeover and explains how he integrated his experience into his understanding of the person. (Note that all citations are from Kohut Archive unless otherwise indicated.) Kohut wrote to a colleague about Vienna in the 1930s:

That the application of my work to the motivations of people and to their behavior in the arena of history is very important to me can be deduced easily not only from my earlier remarks regarding the experiences of the late 1930s when I witnessed the disintegration of the whole culture that had formed and sustained me but also from the fact that I have many times in my work attempted to apply the lessons I learned in the psychoanalytic setting to the area “beyond the bounds of the basic rule” (Kohut to Dan Offer, December 15, 1978).

Another letter in the archive is also revealing. After fleeing Vienna, Kohut spent about a year in Great Britain, living for most of that time in Kitchener, a refugee camp. The letter from a friend, who was a camp leader at Kitchener, to Kohut reveals that Kohut was acutely aware of not only the disintegration of the culture, as he wrote to Dan Offer, but his own fragmentation. It suggests how badly Kohut suffered during this time. In the letter from 1943, his friend described his own state as “traumatic shock with mostly after-effects that have ruined my [brain] to a certain degree (or make it appear that way) and that come to [throw] me into a panic whenever I try to bring my very Ego into action.” His friend then adds that he compares his present state of mind to Kohut’s in 1937-38. In other words, his friend’s self-description echoes Kohut’s mental state as Nazism took control of Vienna ([confidential] to Kohut, October 11, 1943). Kohut’s experience of a fragmented state generated his ability to empathize with the breakable self and consequently brought him to write about this state in a clinical setting. Indeed, Kohut’s son speculated that his father probably suffered not only in reality but also in fantasy from what happened and from what he imagined might have happened (Thomas Kohut, Personal communication, in Schneider, 2011).

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Kohut wrote The Two Analyses of Mr. Z (1979) which, as Goeffrey Cocks (The Curve of Life: Correspondence of Heinz Kohut 1923-1981, 1994) and Strozier (2001) suggest, provides a description of Kohut’s own analysis in disguised form. In his analysis, Mr. Z dreamed about concentration camps and saw piles of bodies, which he was not sure were dead or alive. Kohut referred to this dream as being a crucial one in Mr. Z’s analysis, representing the shifting from mother to father theme. It is a telling example of how Kohut avoided the subject of the murders themselves in that the victims are presented but not discussed. One could say they are “present absentees” (Grossman 1992, Present Absentees), to denote this existence-lacuna: there, but ignored and voiceless.

Only in later years, when Kohut was already an established founder of a new school of thought, did he explicitly mention the Shoah in his published writing. Referring to the healing process of the victims, he wrote, “The prolonged exposure to a milieu that lacked all selfobject support created self-defects in at least some of the survivors, including the propensity toward profound disintegration anxiety that the mere passage of time will not cure” (Joseph D. Lichtenberg and Samuel Kaplan, eds., Reflections on Self Psychology, 1983, 397-398). Although Kohut refers to the survivors of concentration and death camps, one wonders if this statement is self-referential. It expresses a tragic sentiment about himself which nevertheless directed him against the “mere passage of time” in his writing about analyzing, restoring, and curing the fragmented self.

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