Heinz Kohut

Heinz Kohut (3 May 1913 – 8 October 1981) was an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst best known for his development of self psychology, an influential school of thought within psychodynamic/psychoanalytic theory which helped transform the modern practice of analytic and dynamic treatment approaches.

Kohut was born on 3 May 1913, in Vienna, Austria, to Felix Kohut and Else Kohut (née Lampl).

He was the only child of the family.

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

His 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.

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

Else's relationship with her son has been described as "narcissistic enmeshment".

Kohut was not enrolled in school until the fifth grade.

Before that he was taught by several tutors, a series of "Fräuleins and mademoiselles".

Special care was taken that he learn French.

From 1924 on he attended the Döblinger Gymnasium in Grinzing, or the 19th District, where the Kohuts built a house.

During his time at the school he had one, then he had been isolated from his peers by his mother.

At school, a special emphasis was given to the Greek and Latin languages and Greek and Roman literature.

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

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

At school he wrote his thesis on Euripides' play The Cyclops.

His Latin teacher, who had anti-Semitic sentiments and later participated in the Austrian Nazi movement, accused him of plagiarism.

The thesis was accepted after Kohut's father intervened.

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

His studies took six years, during which time he spent six months in internships in Paris, first at the Hôtel-Dieu, and then at the Hôpital Saint-Louis.

The latter hospital specialized in the treatment of syphilis, which subjected Kohut to shocking experiences.

In Paris, he became acquainted with Jacques Palaci, a Jewish medical student from Istanbul, and paid a visit to him in 1936.

The following year, Kohut's father died of leukemia.

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

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

After Austria was annexed to Germany by Hitler on 12 March 1938, the new regime presented difficulties for Kohut, as he still had to take his final exams at the medical faculty.

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

The Nazis then effectively confiscated all property owned by Jews.

The property was sold for much less than its market value, and much of the rest was taken by the state in taxes.

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

Many of his relatives who stayed behind were killed in the Holocaust.

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

A friend from Vienna, Siegmund Levarie, who had emigrated to live with an uncle in Chicago and who would subsequently become a famous musicologist in the United States, arranged a visa for him and invited him to join him there.

Kohut's mother Else also emigrated to Chicago, traveling via Italy.

With the money she had smuggled out of Austria, she opened a shop called "De Elsie's".

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.

He was board certified in neurology in 1947.

Around this time, he apparently decided that he would assume a gentile identity, and chose the Unitarian Church as his denomination.

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

Too much of his time was spent in the laboratory, and there was not enough contact with human emotion.