The Chicago Institute lectures.

Abstract

From 1972 through 1976, Heinz Kohut gave a series of lectures, actually informal talks, to advanced candidates at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, and these lectures, “lightly edited” by his students Paul and Marion Tolpin, are collected in this book. Few of us have the opportunity to learn from someone whose ideas are in the process of transforming psychoanalytic thinking. Reading the transcripts of these talks may provide some of the sense of what it must have been like for his students when Kohut was making his major contribution to the field. This experience comes with advantages and disadvantages. These talks were given between the publication of The Analysis of the Self in 1971 (1) and The Restoration of the Self in 1977 (2), and it is evident that Kohut’s conceptualization of the role of the self, “selfobjects,” and the narcissistic transference is in process. In these lectures, Kohut is evidently not trying to present his new ideas in an organized fashion; rather, he seems to be engaging with his audience and trying to relate his concepts to the dominant trends in analytic thinking that the candidates have been taught. Much of the content of the talks is taken up with questions of the relationship between the self and the drives, between the structural neuroses and narcissistic problems, between the centrality of oedipal conflicts and the cohesiveness or fragmentation of the self. The editors point out that at this stage in his thinking, Kohut saw his ideas as enriching the understanding of oedipal conflicts rather than supplanting the centrality of the structural neuroses. Kohut is explicit: