The Search for the Self: Volume 2: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut 1978-1981

'The re-issuing of the four volumes of the author's writings is a major publishing event for psychoanalysts who are interested in both the theoretical and the therapeutic aspects of psychoanalysis. These volumes contain the author's pre-self psychology essays as well as those he wrote in order to continue to expand on his groundbreaking ideas, which he presented in The Analysis of the Self; the Restoration of the Self; and in How Does Analysis Cure? These volumes of The Search for the Self permit the reader to understand not only the above three basic texts of psychoanalytic self psychology more profoundly, but also to appreciate the author's sustained openness to further changes - to dare to present his self psychology as in continued flux, influenced by newly emerging empirical data of actual clinical practice. The current re-issue of the four volumes of The Search for the Self would assure that the younger generation of psychoanalysts would be exposed to a clinical theory that could contribute greatly to solving the therapeutic dilemmas facing psychoanalysis today'. This is Volume two.

About the Author

Heinz Kohut (1913-81) was born on May 3, 1913 in Vienna, Austria - a country whose culture, literature and music permeated his very being. He finished his medical studies in 1938, after Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany, giving him little time to escape the horrors that awaited the Jews in that country. He then spent a year in England, from where he emigrated to the United State and settled in Chicago in 1939. Trained in neurology and psychiatry, he attained the rank of Assistant Professor in Psychiatry at the University of Chicago. He became a psychoanalyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he was a highly esteemed member of the faculty. As teacher, supervisor, mentor, thinker his two-year course on Freud's work became legendary. Kohut became President of the American Psychoanalytic Association for 1964-65. During the last ten years of his life, from 1971 to 1981, even while he was deathly ill throughout, he created his post-Freudian "self psychology" - a new theory and treatment approach to psychoanalysis - that was appreciated world-wide. Kohut is the author of many books, including 'How Does Analysis Cure?' and 'The Restoration of the Self'. Paul H. Ornstein, MD, is Professor of Psychiatry, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and Training and Supervising Analyst, Cincinnati Psychoanalytic Institute.