Charles Strozier - Heinz Kohut

Lincolns Quest for Union: A Psychological Portrait

Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America

EDITED BY CHARLES B . STROZIER

The Year 2000: Essays on the End

(with Michael Flynn)

Genocide, War, and Human Survival

(with Michael Flynn)

Trauma and Self

(with Michael Flynn)

Self Psychology and The Humanities:

Reflections on a New Psychoanalytic Approach

(writings of Heinz Kohut on the humanities)

The Leader: Psychohistorical Studies

(with Daniel Offer)

The Public and Private Lincoln: Contemporary Perspectives

(with Cullom Davis, Rebecca Veach, and Geoffrey Ward)

Heinz Kohut (19131981) stood at the center of the twentieth-century psychoanalytic movement. After fleeing his native Vienna when the Nazis took power, he arrived in Chicago, where he spent the rest of his life. He became the most creative figure in the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, and is now remembered as the founder of self psychology, whose emphasis on empathy sought to make Freudian psychoanalysis less neutral.

Charles B. Strozier brings to his telling of Kohuts life all the tools of a skillful analyst: intelligence, erudition, empathy, contrary insight, and a willingness to look far below the surface. In the new introduction by the author included in this softcover edition, Strozier explores his experience in the role of biographer, particularly his commitment to psychological biography, with frankness and intimacy, as he provides readers with a sharp and perceptive survey of the art of recording lives.

Praise for Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst

Strozier faced a truly daunting task in probing the life of a man who was as complex and duplicitous as he was gifted. Yet he succeeds brilliantly in conveying Kohuts intellectual power, and in making clear how and why he became the most influential clinical psychoanalyst of the last half-century. Strozier brings an extraordinary combination of empathy and breadth to this masterful biography.

Robert Jay Lifton, coauthor of Who Owns Death?: Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions

This striking story of a single man is also a history of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century. Strozier has turned a light on post-Freudian psychoanalysis as he has illuminated the life of its most distinguished member.

Arnold Goldberg, M.D., author of Being of Two Minds and editor of the series Progress in Self Psychology

Strozier leaves no stone unturned in this exhaustive study of Kohuts character, life, and ideas, offering a detailed look at the theoretical differences that separate him from Freud. Compelling and masterfully written, it is a balanced and affecting story of a courageous yet flawed mans struggle to break free from orthodox constraints and a painful childhood to find his own voice.

Lee Scheier, Chicago Tribune

Charles Strozier has produced a landmark book on Kohut [that] explores the path, personal and political and conceptual of the making of a psychoanalyst.The book is very detailed and meticulous as well as arrestingly written, holding the attention of the reader in the twists and turns of Kohuts developments within the contexts of life and politics in Vienna and the U.S., and of course psychoanalytic politics. It is an impressive work of scholarship that reveals both Kohuts flaws and genius.

Douglas Kirsner, The Australian Journal of Psychotherapy

It is rare in the growing library of biographies of psychoanalysts to have a work that is characterized, as is this volume, by thorough research, psychological insight into the persons inner life, and an appreciation of the relevance of the persons thinking for clinical work. Strozier did an exhaustive job of interviewing people who had known Kohut. He not only tracked down many of Kohuts patients and supervisees but also found Kohuts closest friend from his childhood in Vienna. As a historian, Strozier did not overlook archival research, locating, for example, the Nazis inventory of the Kohut familys assets in the Viennese State Archives and Kohuts candidate file from his period as a student at the Chicago Institute. Stroziers biography accomplishes everything that I could expect of it. Strozier tells Kohuts life story, explicates his work and its relationship to classical psychoanalysis, and gives the reader a sense of what Kohut was like as a person. Strozier does all this while providing a readable, energetic narrative.

James William Anderson, Contemporary Psychology

Strozier gives us a vivid picture of Kohut the man and allows us to see the many areas of overlap between his theory and his personality.

Robert May, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

On the twentieth anniversary of Kohuts death, and after seventeen years of painstaking work investigating Kohut the man, through both his own subjective lens as a historian of ideas and the memories of those who knew, loved, and/or hated Kohut, Dr. Strozier has produced a monumental work that succeeds in powerfully conveying the emergence of self psychology as a new and influential analytic paradigm. Furthermore, he has done so without sacrificing the reality of the complex man who gave birth to the movement, a man whom he admired partly for personal reasons. A major contribution.

Linda A. Chernus, Clinical Social Work Journal

Charles Strozier has crafted a significant psychoanalytic study of Heinz Kohut. He comes to his task well equipped. Given the complex, dramatic, and controversial aspects of Kohuts life and work, Strozier has come up with a well-balanced dynamic picture.

Robert J. Marshall, Modern Psychology

The biography of Heinz Kohut is a story that should be required reading for anyone entering the practice of psychiatry, especially those beginning in psychoanalysis.

Jo Rogers, MyShelf.com

The author recounts the gripping, moving, and instructive story of this driven, creative, cultured intellectual, who was much respected as a teacher and therapist but disliked for his arrogance. Too important to leave to professionals, this accessible work is highly recommended for all libraries.

Library Journal

I had never heard of Heinz Kohut until I read Charles B. Stroziers biography of him. Glancing beforehand at the some 500 pages of text, I expected a long, boring treatise about an obscure academic figure. I was wrong. Stroziers Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst turned out to be interesting, unpretentious, and entertaining. I found Stroziers tolerance for complexity wonderful. A wide audience would do well to read [the book], not only to learn about an intellectually and sexually complex man, but to think about how that complexity may apply to their own lives.

Angela Watkins, Roanoke Times

Strozier has written a fine biography

R. H. Balsam, Choice

The richly probing results of a profound immersion in the Kohutian psychoanalytic universe, one that tried to put a human face on Freudian positivism.

Kirkus Reviews

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 selfobject, and the idealizing and mirroring transferences, in clear English.