Heinz Kohut

Heinz Kohut was an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst who developed self psychology, a major school within psychodynamic theory that reshaped modern analytic and dynamic treatment approaches. Born in Vienna in 1913 to assimilated Jewish parents, he was an only child raised in the Ninth District. His father, a former concert pianist traumatized by World War I, went into business, while his mother opened her own shop after the war—an unusual step for women in Vienna at the time. Kohut’s relationship with his mother has been described as one of narcissistic enmeshment. He was not enrolled in school until the fifth grade, instead being taught by a series of tutors with a focus on French. From 1924 he attended a gymnasium in Grinzing, where his family had built a house. There, his mother isolated him from peers, and the curriculum emphasized Greek, Latin, and classical literature. He also came to appreciate Goethe, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil. After a period studying French in Brittany, he wrote his thesis on a Euripides play, which his Latin teacher—an antisemite who later joined the Austrian Nazi movement—accused of plagiarism; his father’s intervention secured its acceptance. Kohut entered the University of Vienna’s medical faculty in 1932, completing his studies in six years, including internships in Paris at the Hôtel-Dieu and a syphilis hospital. Following his father’s death from leukemia, he began psychoanalysis with August Aichhorn, a friend of Sigmund Freud. After Austria’s annexation by Hitler in 1938, Kohut faced difficulties taking his final exams, as Jewish professors had been removed. Nazis confiscated Jewish property, and Kohut fled, landing in a British refugee camp before traveling to Chicago in 1940, where a friend had arranged a visa. His mother later joined him, using smuggled funds to open a shop. In Chicago, Kohut secured a neurology residency at the University of Chicago’s Billings Hospital, becoming board certified in 1947, though he found neurology unsatisfying due to its lack of emotional contact. He moved into psychiatry and psychoanalysis after initially being rejected by the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis; he circumvented this by entering analysis with Ruth Eissler, a Viennese training analyst. Accepted to the institute in 1946, he became a training and supervising analyst in 1953. Unlike some contemporaries who shortened an