Person
Heinz Kohut
Austrian-American analyst who founded self psychology.
- Born
- 1913
- Died
- 1981
- Influenced by
- Heinz Hartmann
reworked
- Transference 1971 Describes mirror and idealizing transferences in narcissistic personality disorders.
- Denial 1971 Uses Freud’s term disavowal for a ‘vertical split’ in the personality: archaic grandiose demands stay conscious but are walled off from the reality ego and exist side by side with it, unlike the ‘horizontal split’ by which repression keeps them unconscious.
introduced
- Narcissistic transference 1971
- Selfobject 1971 Names as self-objects the archaic objects a person experiences as part of the self rather than as independent centres of initiative.
- Grandiose self 1971 Sets the grandiose self beside the idealized parental imago as the two archaic narcissistic configurations revived in analysis; he had first named both in a 1968 paper.
influenced by
- Heinz Hartmann 1971 Kohut's "The Analysis of the Self" (1971) starts from Hartmann's definition of narcissism as the libidinal investment of the self rather than of the ego, the step from which Kohut's psychology of the self developed.