American Decades
Kohut, Heinz 1913-1981
CREATOR OF SELF-PSYCHOLOGY
A Challenge to Freud.
According to Sigmund Freud, the Oedipus complex—a boy's aggressive impulse against the adult father and love for the mother, accompanied by castration fear—is the central conflict in a child's development. Nonresolution of this complex could lead to neurotic behavior in the adult. Heinz Kohut, the creator of a new body of analytic theory called self-psychology, focused instead on the narcissist—the person whose vital mental health dimension of self-love has gone amiss. His new explanations and treatment of the narcissist's problems bypassed the Oedipus stage and caused conflicts in the psychoanalytic community.
Formative Years.
As the German son of a Jewish father and Roman Catholic mother during the Hitler era, Kohut was forced to flee Vienna under Nazi racial laws. He traveled first to Britain, then to the United States, where he became a leading...
[The entire page is 581 words long]
1970's Medicine and Health
- Overview
-
Topics in the News
- The Abortion Controversy
- Acupuncture
- The Case of Karen Ann Quinlan
- Deinstitutionalizing the Mentally Ill
- The Economics of Health Care
- The Fitness Craze
- Health Maintenance Organizations
- Legionnaires' Disease and the Science of Epidemiology
- Lyme Disease
- New Technologies in Medicine
- Nursing in Transition
- Nutritionists and the Battle Over Sugared Cereals
- The Swine Flu Scare
- The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
- Who Worked in Health Care?
- Headline Makers
- People in the News
- Awards
- Deaths
- Publications
- Important Events in Medicine and Health, 1970–1979
