Heinz Kohut: biography and career of this psychoanalyst.

A summary of the life of Heinz Kohut, a very influential Viennese psychoanalyst.

Heinz Kohut was an Austrian psychoanalyst who developed his entire professional career in the city of Chicago, in the United States.

The most outstanding aspect of Kohut's life has been the development of his theory on the self, which went beyond the framework of Freudian theories, being his core construct the "self" on the personality of the human being.

The following is a brief review of the life of this Viennese psychoanalyst through a biography by Heinz Kohler. a biography by Heinz Kohuthighlighting the most important milestones and events of his professional career.

Brief biography of Heinz Kohut.

Heinz Kohut was born in 1913 in Vienna, belonging to an upper-middle class Jewish family.. His father, Felix, was a well-known pianist, who had to serve on the eastern front for four years during World War I. His mother, Else, was the main support for the couple's only son, Heinz.

His mother, Else, was the main support for the couple's only son, Heinz. She was always an overprotective mother to her son, so that during his early school years, Kohut spent them learning at home with the help of tutors that his mother had hired.

However, Heinz ended up going to school for his final year of primary education and then went on to study for eight years at the Doblinger Gymnasium, a secondary school in Vienna.

His teenage years

During his teenage years, Kohut had a tutor named Ernst Morawetz, who took it upon himself to nurture the young man's cultural interest, taking him to museums and museums in Vienna.He took him to museums and the opera, where they could go up to three times a week.

Kohut from a very young age proved to be a cultured person with great eagerness for learning in various fields such as history, literature, arts and music; always being updated with respect to the most avant-garde trends of the time.

University Stage

In 1932 he enrolled in medicine at the University of Vienna, where he completed his university studies, graduating in 1938.

At that time he did not show much interest in Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, but he had already done some research on psychoanalysis, However, he had already been researching psychotherapy around 1937, when he found interesting the work of a psychologist known as Walter Marseilleswho specialized in a test used primarily to assess personality, the Rorschach test.

Subsequently, he began to investigate on a psychoanalyst named August Aichhorn, who was a friend of Freud, having to interrupt his study by a political-social event that year in his country, the "Anschluss", or what is the same, the takeover of Austria by Hitler and his army in 1938.

Arrival in the United States

Due to the political-social situation that his country was living, and by extension, great part of Europe, Kuhut, who was in serious danger, traveled first to England, where he resided for a year and, later, he obtained a visa to emigrate to the United States.

Kohut arrived in the United States in 1940, with only 25 cents in his pocket.He took a bus with them to Chicago, where a childhood friend of his, Siegmund Levarie, who was working at the University of Chicago, was living.

At the beginning of his stay in Chicago, Kohut decided to continue his training in medicine, and went on to complete residencies in psychiatry and neurology at the same university where his friend Levarie worked.

Specialization as a psychoanalyst

It was during those early years working as a neurologist and psychiatrist, in the 1940s, that he gradually began to show greater interest in psychoanalysis.

As a result, he began to work with psychoanalysis, he began to work with the psychoanalyst Ruth Eissler and also started his career at the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysiswhere he graduated in 1950.

During this decade he married Elizabeth Meyers in 1948 and they had a son, Thomas August Kohut.

A period of great growth as a recognized psychoanalyst

In the 1950s, the name of the psychoanalyst Kohut began to sound strongly among his fellow psychoanalysts in the city of Chicago, being well recognized for the most part, being seen as the most creative figure of the movement at that time.

This period was very prolific for Kohut. He worked as a professor of psychiatry at the university, at the same time that he devoted himself to his work as a clinical psychoanalyst.. All this while publishing articles in widely recognized journals on psychoanalysis, the most popular being an article he published on empathy in 1959.

In this article, Kohut argued the fundamental importance of empathy in psychoanalytic therapy, defining empathy as "vicarious introspection".

After Kohut's research on empathy, what this concept entails became for him an essential and elementary tool in his conception of psychoanalysis and psychology in general.

His time as president of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

In the decade of the 1960s, the most noteworthy could be his administrative stage in the presidency of the American Psychoanalytic Association.This was the recognition of a lifetime of work dedicated to the study and development of psychoanalysis in the broadest sense, having developed new theories and models of therapy based on psychoanalytic theory.

Last years and culmination of his professional career

At this stage published his most transcendent book, "The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Analysis of the Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders". (The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Analysis of the Treatment of the Narcissistic Personality Disorders), in 1971.

This was a book that came to have a great impact on the field of psychoanalytic theories because Kohut extended Freud's theory of narcissism.

In 1977 he continued the theory of the book published in 1971 with the publication of another book entitled "The Restoration of the Self", in which moved from the focus on narcissism to a discussion of the ego (self), the development of the ego, vicissitudes in ego development and its gradient of tension. (self), the development of the self, vicissitudes in the development of the self and its gradient of tension, called by Kohut as "bipolar self", an idea that has not transcended too much.

However, in his last years he suffered from Cancer and had to slow down his pace of work in all areas. In addition, he had to undergo bypass surgery in 1979, having to go through a slow recovery and, throughout that period, he began to develop inner ear problems, as well as suffering from pneumonia.

Despite Kohut's serious health problems, he continued to work until his last days.. In 1981, Kohut was in a very delicate state of health. He died on October 8 of that year.

Posthumous publications of this author

At the time of his death, Kohut had a book he was writing nearing completion, entitled "How Does Analysis Cure?" (How Does Analysis Cure?). It was edited by a colleague of his, Arnold Goldberg, and published in 1984.

In 1985, Charles B. Strozier published a book with unpublished essays by Heinz Kohut entitled "Self Psychology and the Humanities".

In the 1990s, two more volumes of a collection of Kohut's articles were published under the title "Search for the Self", as well as a volume on the "Self Psychology and the Humanities".as well as a volume on Kohut's epistolary, edited by Geoffrey Cocks, under the title "The Curve of Life", in 1994.

In the following we will see the most essential aspects of the psychoanalytic theory that Kohut developed, throughout his long career, on the basis of the analysis of the "self".

Heinz Kohut's theory of the Self

The theory developed by Heinz Kohut has been considered a revolution within the current of psychoanalysis.

Heinz's main contributions have been the concept of the self, his redefinition of narcissism and his vision of empathy or vicarious introspection..

Kohut adopted a positive vision of people that moved away from Freud's vision of the human being in constant division between his drives and continuous internal conflicts. Kohut also makes a substitution in his psychoanalytic theory of the fundamental concepts of Freudian theory (ego, it and superego; conscious and unconscious) by the concepts called Self and the objects of the self.

1. The self

For Kohut the self is constituted as a core concept of the personality of the human being.being the place through which their experiences take place; which allows to give sense and coherence to the psychological processes or the human psyche.

2. The objects of the self

The objects of the self are composed of the experiences that the person has about the others.. For Kohut there are two types of objects:

• Specular: one sees oneself reflected in others through feedback received in interactions with them.
• Idealizing: one internalizes positive qualities of others and adopts them for oneself.

3. Narcissism

Regarding narcissism, unlike Freud who had a negative conception of narcissism, Kohut has an evolutionary view of it..

He understands that in the development of the self, the child needs to receive parental attention and to feel like a special human being, so that his parents must attend to his call for attention, forming a cohesive narcissism. Parents should also facilitate the child's help in confronting the reality of his or her limitations.

According to this theory, the problems of narcissism arise when the parents do not help the child correctly in this process, because they do not support him enough or they are very critical with him, giving as a result a problematic narcissism.

4. Empathy

As for Kohut's conception of empathy, it is close to Kohut's view of empathy is close to the vision on it of Carl Rogers and modern psychology.

He understands empathy as an ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of the person in front of him. Therefore, his main idea when treating patients is that the best way to do so is to try to understand their point of view and the experiences they have.