78 Facts About Heinz Kohut

Heinz Kohut's parents were assimilated Jews living in Alsergrund, or the Ninth District, who had married two years earlier.

Heinz Kohut's father was an aspiring concert pianist, but abandoned his dreams having been traumatized by his experiences in World War I and moved into business with Paul Bellak.

Heinz Kohut's mother opened her own shop sometime after the war, something that few women did at that time in Vienna.

Heinz Kohut was not enrolled in school until the fifth grade.

Heinz Kohut came to appreciate Goethe, Thomas Mann and Robert Musil.

In 1929, Heinz Kohut spent two months in Saint-Quay-Portrieux in Brittany in order to study French.

Heinz Kohut entered the medical faculty of the University of Vienna in 1932.

Heinz Kohut's studies took six years, during which time he spent six months in internships in Paris, first at the Hotel-Dieu, and then at the Hopital Saint-Louis.

Sometime after this, Heinz Kohut entered psychotherapy with Walter Marseilles, who seems not to have been competent at his profession.

Early in 1938, Heinz Kohut began psychoanalysis with August Aichhorn, a close friend of Sigmund Freud.

Heinz Kohut was eventually allowed to take them after all the Jewish professors had been removed from the university.

Heinz Kohut eventually left Austria, landing first in a refugee camp in Kent, England.

In February 1940, Heinz Kohut was allowed to travel in a British convoy to Boston, from where he travelled to Chicago by bus.

Heinz Kohut was able to secure his first position in the South Shore Hospital in Chicago, and in 1941 he began a residency in neurology at the University of Chicago's Billings Hospital, where he lived and worked until 1948.

Heinz Kohut was unhappy with neurology, and it seems he was bored in this field.

In late 1942, Heinz Kohut applied to the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, which had been founded by Franz Alexander in 1932, modelling it on the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute of the 1920s.

The reason for this remains unclear, but Heinz Kohut was not even allowed to begin a didactic analysis.

In 1944 Heinz Kohut decided to leave neurology and move into psychiatry, and in 1947 he was appointed associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago.

Heinz Kohut began to receive patients on a permanent basis in 1949.

Heinz Kohut became a training and supervising analyst as well as a member of the institute's staff in 1953.

Unlike Franz Alexander, who had sought to shorten analyses, Heinz Kohut took as long as it took for the patients to get well in analysis.

Heinz Kohut analyzed several people, who were already analysts but who felt they had not benefited as much from their didactic analyses as they had hoped.

Heinz Kohut soon became known as the most gifted and creative analyst in the Chicago Institute.

Heinz Kohut appeared as a master of metapsychology in these lectures.

Heinz Kohut later gave the course over to Philip Seitz, who had been auditing the course and had made notes of it that he had discussed with Kohut and then amended those notes in accordance of those discussions.

Heinz Kohut's teaching style is said to have been brilliant, but at the same time it eclipsed the minds of the listeners, and according to Paul Ornstein who took the course, the style was pedagogically a failure.

Heinz Kohut felt that analysts should be scientists and not technicians who just applied a set of rules to their work.

Heinz Kohut believed that if the latter were to be the case, the whole field of psychoanalysis would be assimilated to dynamic psychiatry and disappear forever.

Heinz Kohut was active in the American Psychoanalytic Association from the 1950s.

Heinz Kohut served on the board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and in a number of committees.

Heinz Kohut became friends with Heinz Hartmann, who was a very important figure for him.

Heinz Kohut was at the time very much a representative of traditional Freudian analysis, and he was very careful not to do anything that could have been interpreted as a departure from traditional views.

Heinz Kohut first met her in 1964 in a meeting in Princeton.

Various activities were arranged for her in Chicago, and for Heinz Kohut this visit was a great success.

Heinz Kohut was beginning to have ambivalent feelings about classical analysis.

Anna Freud advised him not offer himself for a defeat, and Heinz Kohut withdrew from the race.

Heinz Kohut then explained this situation to his colleagues by saying that the presidency would have interfered with his creative work, which was a self-invented myth that many colleagues duly bought.

Heinz Kohut decided not to publish it, as Mann was still alive.

Heinz Kohut's first truly scientific contribution was his 1959 article on empathy, entitled "Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis: An Examination of the Relationship Between Mode of Observation and Theory", which was written for the twenty-fifth anniversary meeting of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis in November 1957, and presented by Heinz Kohut in a psychoanalytic congress in Paris the same year.

Heinz Kohut spoke and wrote on the post-war psychological problems of the German people when he was invited to speak in Frankfurt am Main in October 1969.

Heinz Kohut was chosen as the laudator when the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade was awarded to Alexander Mitscherlich, with whom Kohut had become acquainted since the 1950s.

Heinz Kohut then developed his ideas around what he called the tripartite self.

Heinz Kohut demonstrated his interest in how we develop our "sense of self" using narcissism as a model.

Heinz Kohut presented his theory as a parallel to the drive theory and the theory of the Oedipus complex.

In 1971, just after the publication of The Analysis of the Self, Heinz Kohut was diagnosed with lymphoma or lymphatic cancer.

Heinz Kohut gave up his talks at Princeton University, but he did speak regularly at the University of Cincinnati, which bestowed upon him an honorary degree in November 1973.

In Strozier's view, Heinz Kohut's illness forced him to think for himself and resulted in several breakthroughs in his career as a theorist of psychoanalysis.

Heinz Kohut came to the conclusion that many analysts had been shaming their analysands in the guise of offering interpretations, that neurotic pathology was only a cover for narcissistic problems, that idealization was not a form of defense, that everyone needs mirroring, and that rage is a byproduct of the disintegration of the self.

Heinz Kohut broke free from classical metapsychology and formed his own, general psychology, with the self as its center.

The approaching death forced Heinz Kohut to think with his own brains.

Heinz Kohut knew that he was shaking psychoanalysis in its core, and he was afraid he would not have the time to finish his revolutionary job.

Heinz Kohut devoted his time to his own writing, to listening to music and reading about the arts.

Heinz Kohut feels perfect himself, and asserts his perfection with self-righteousness, and demands control over others who would then serve as vicarious regulators of self-esteem.

Heinz Kohut was even voted out of the board of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.

In 1973, Heinz Kohut assembled again the group of his younger followers, inactive since 1969, to write what would be published as the so-called Casebook, officially The Psychology of the Self: A Casebook.

Heinz Kohut then assembled a smaller group which would meet in private homes.

Heinz Kohut started to write this book in Carmel, California, during his summer vacation in 1974.

Heinz Kohut tried as best he could to avoid the language of the drive theory as well as psychoanalytic metapsychology, which made his first book, The Analysis of the Self, such a difficult read.

Heinz Kohut had decided to make his new book more accessible, and he worked together with Natalie Altman, his publisher's editor, who would read and comment on his text.

Heinz Kohut had abandoned the drive theory and its language, and he was never again to return to the mainstream Freudian psychoanalysis.

Heinz Kohut says that The Restoration of the Self "is not a technical or theoretical monograph written detachedly by an author who has achieved mastery in a stable and established field of knowledge".

Heinz Kohut writes about the Tragic Man and the Guilty Man, and Freud seems almost to suffocate Heinz Kohut.

Mr X was a German student of theology analyzed by Eckstaedt, but Kohut had disguised him as a young American man, who had wanted to join the Peace Corps but had been turned down.

Heinz Kohut had supposedly been analyzed in the US by Kohut's younger colleague in supervision with him.

Heinz Kohut later published the case in English in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, carefully edited by Natalie Altman.

Mr Z is presented as a patient that Kohut had analyzed twice for four years, first within a Freudian framework, and after an interval of five years, within Kohut's new framework of self psychology.

Heinz Kohut's father was away for a few years, before the son was five years of age, the story of a skiing vacation and the hotel there is similar to Kohut's own life.

The father of Mr Z sits in with a small band and sings with them, when in reality Felix Kohut was an accomplished pianist.

In 1948 Heinz Kohut presented case material in a seminar at the Chicago Institute, and one of the listeners was a social worker from the institute, Elizabeth Meyer.

Thomas Heinz Kohut studied at the University of Chicago Lab School and eventually went through psychoanalytic training, but then decided to make a career as a historian and a psychohistorian.

Heinz Kohut was psychologically unable to visit his native Vienna until 1957.

Heinz Kohut is said to have been the only person who could really get under Kohut's skin.

Heinz Kohut would be pushy and aggressive, speak directly at other people's faces and poke people with her finger.

For Heinz Kohut, the fact that his mother had turned out to be crazy, was a liberating experience.

Heinz Kohut now realized that his whole life had been spent trying to escape from his latently psychotic mother.

Heinz Kohut considered the Vietnam War to be immoral and stupid, yet he did not initially understand his son's anti-war attitude.

Thomas Heinz Kohut was at the time studying at Oberlin College, which had a long history in opposing all kinds of social injustice, beginning with opposition to slavery and being an important station in the Underground Railroad.

Heinz Kohut fell into a coma on the evening of October 7,1981, and died of cancer in Chicago on the morning of October 8.