Heinz Kohut by Charles Strozier

Author:Charles Strozier [Strozier, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-one

ON RAGE

Perhaps the most common criticism of Kohut’s work is that he fails to deal with aggression adequately. In his emphasis on empathy, so the argument goes, Kohut directed attention away from human evil and the violent potentials in the self that are essential to grasp and confront if we are to understand the astonishing capacity of humans to engage in war, persecution, torture, abuse, and ordinary, garden-variety cruelty. For Kohut, it is said, things are sugarcoated. One loses entirely the crucial insights Freud gained into the “seething cauldron” of id impulses. Even if one concedes, as most observers now would, that classical psychoanalysis as a form of treatment is only clinically relevant in radically modified form, Freud as a philosopher of the human soul properly understood and appreciated the varied forms of aggression. Kohut is uplifting, the critics say, but in the end superficial, naive, best fit for the surface, where Americans mostly dwell psychologically.

Such criticism drove Kohut to distraction. It was the kind of charge that led him to say his critics read between the lines of his work.1 His views on aggression differed from those of Freud, to be sure, but he hardly ignored the topic; he was, in fact, deeply concerned with the issue of aggression, both at the level of the individual and in history, and he had some original things to say about it. His strategic mistake may have been partly that he separated out his thoughts on the subject from The Analysis of the Self and then did not return to them in any systematic way in his last two books, especially The Restoration of the Self, which remains his most widely read work.2 Perhaps Kohut felt there was no need for reiteration, since he had absolute faith in the completeness of his one full-length discussion of the topic, “Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage,” which he first delivered in New York as the A. A. Brill Lecture of the New York Psychoanalytic Society on November 30, 1971, and published the following year in the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child.3 There was no question in Kohut’s mind that this was the “best paper” he ever wrote.4 It brought together years of reflection and articulated a nuanced position about aggression that has yet to be fully appreciated in psychoanalytic theory or psychology in general.

Kohut’s concern with rage also had a powerful personal subtext. He began writing about rage during his 1971 summer vacation in Carmel as he awaited the dreaded diagnosis of cancer after postponing further tests to ascertain the cause of his hardened spleen; he then finished the paper that fall after the confirmation and initial treatment of the disease. 5 Kohut railed at the gods who sought to destroy him but took his misery to a higher level of human understanding.

Kohut’s rage paper begins slowly, in the rhetorical style he used in teaching seminars—circling, associating, warming to his subject. He describes two works of the great German writer, Heinrich von Kleist, and their relation to narcissism and rage.

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