Heinz Kohut, The Making of a Psychoanalyst
 Charles B. Strozier
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2001 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, NY
  ISBN: 0374168806


An biography of Heinz Kohut who was at the center of the 20th century American psychoanalytic movement. After the Nazis took over Vienna he fled to Chicago, where he spent the rest of his life & is now remembered as the founder of “self psychology.”

Heinz Kohut was a psychoanalyst who changed the field into its modern form as we know it today. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna in the early part of the last century, Kohut quickly showed promise as a gifted intellectual. He finished his university studies during the Anschluss &, because he was a Jew, was reluctantly allowed to take the final exams to qualify him as an M.D.

In 1939, he fled to the U.S. & in the years after World War II he became a paradigmatic figure in the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis & changed the face of psychoanalysis. He rose to prominence & eventually became the most prestigious analyst in the country, serving as president of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

He early recognized the limitations of classical psychoanalysis & worked to put a more humanistic face on it until his death in 1981.

He often confounded his closest friends with his astonishing stubbornness & almost surreptitious need for privacy, his legacy, however, in the field of U.S. psychoanalysis is legendary.

Biographer, Charles B. Strozier, has produced a sympathetic & readable narrative of this eminently human's life & work. He addresses Kohut's sexual ambivalence & his tormented feelings about his Jewishness. These feelings were so complex that Kohut would make scenes in kosher restaurants by insisting on having a ham sandwich with a glass of milk -- challenging one of the fundamental kosher laws against mixing meat & dairy products. Kohut was as complicated as his field of study & Charles Strozier has skillfully offered an intense look at an intensely lived life.

This biography will appeal to those who have lived through the same era as Heinz Kohut & who have encountered the less authoritarian & more compassionate school of psychoanalysis now known as self-psychology which made major changes in reformatting the revered Freudian theory & practice.

Strozier leaves no stone unturned & recounts the moving & informative story of this driven, creative intellectual, who was respected as a teacher & therapist yet universally disliked for his arrogance & coldness. This is a profound biography of a charismatic man from a complex era.

A deep drink from an unusual well -- well-written, if somewhat dense in places. Well worth it, however, if you are at all interested in the signs of intelligent life during America's post WWII years which led up to the human potential movement.

More from Charles B. Strozier:
Lincoln's Quest for Union:A Psychological Portrait.
Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America.
Editor of The Year 2000: Essays on the End; Genocide, War, and Human Survival &
Trauma and Self with Michael Flynn.
The Leader: Pyschohistorical Studies with Daniel Offer.
Self Psychology and The Humanities: Reflections on a New Psychoanalitic Approach(writings of Heinz Kohut on the humanities).
The Public and Private Lincoln: Contemporary Perspectives with Cullom Davis, Rebecca Veach & Geoffrey Ward.
(08/26/01)

Rebecca