Heinz Kohut and John Bowlby: The Men and Their Ideas

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Notes

¹The biographical material is from Strozier (2001).

²Kohut's mother was also safely evacuated after a great deal of worry and uncertainty. She also settled in Chicago in 1940.

³In the 1984 book, How Does Analysis Cure, Kohut (1884) describes his views on how the new relationship with the analyst is curative. Further, in response to an imagined critic that accuses Kohut of believing in the curative effect of “corrective emotional experience,” he states, “I could only reply: So be it” (p. 78).

⁴For a summary, see Harlow (1974).

⁵The selfobject concept has been given different connotations in the self psychology literature (see Lichtenberg, Lachman, and Fosshage, 1992, Self and Motivational Systems, for an excellent discussion of this issue). Aside from its different shades of meaning, one of the problems with the concept of a selfobject is that it does a poor job of communicating what is meant to people who are not familiar with psychoanalytic jargon. The word object has its origin in drive theory. In drive theory, an object refers to the aim of a drive, a leftover from Freud's tension-reduction model of the mind. For the uninitiated, the use of the word object is jarring as when we use object relations to refer to interpersonal relations that become internalized, or when we speak of an internalized function of self as a selfobject.

⁶Obviously, the case of Mr. A closely resonates with Kohut's experience with his own father.

⁷This statement has an important caveat. Recent work by Michael Tomasello and his collaborators at the Max Plank Institute in Leipzig, Germany, have shown that chimpanzees can understand the perspective of others in competitive situations, but not in cooperative interactions that involve helping others (Call and Tomasello, 2003; Warneken, Chen, and Tomasello, 2006; Moll and Tomasello, 2007).