Reviewed by Jo Rogers, MyShelf.com
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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.  Heinz Kohut was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1913, and was the only child of Jewish parents.  His father, Felix Kohut, had been on track for a career as a concert pianist until World War I forced him into combat, leaving his infant son and wife in Vienna.  After the war, things were never the same, and his parents, though they never divorced, went their separate ways.  Kohut would come to understand that it was his mother's mental illness that drove them apart.

Kohut studied medicine at the University of Vienna, a 600-year-old institution of higher learning.  But just as he was about to graduate, Hitler and his anti-Semitic barbarians took control of Austria, and it was several months before Kohut was allowed to take his exams.  At last, though, he was given his medical degree.  But soon, he and his mother, Else, were forced to flee Austria.  They wound up in America, in Chicago.

Kohut had long wanted to enter psychoanalysis, and was finally able to do so through the neurology department at the University of Chicago.  He had closely followed the theories put forth by Freud, and was quite a proficient healer.  But he would, in time, move beyond Freud to dismantle many of Freud's theories on the cause of narcissism.  Still, when he put forth his theories, he took great care to try to link them with Freud's teachings.  In truth, he took psychoanalysis to a new level, and one that made more sense.  Kohut was a strange man, and his biography, if you are interested in psychoanalysis, makes for interesting reading.

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