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Heinz Kohut, the founder of self psychology, regarded his work as an outgrowth of Heinz Hartmann's formulations of ego psychology, and Hartmann agreed. Long after his break with ego psychology, Kohut (199Ob) reminisced: "I am very happy that he [Hartmann] still read the manuscript of my Analysis of the Self (1971) and gave it his approval" (p. 285). Like Hartmann's ego psychology, Kohut's self psychology limited the contents of the unconscious to psychic energies and allocated all ideation and mental structure to consciousness. Kohut's concept of the cohesion of the self recast Thomas M. French's characterization of ego strength in terms of the ego's integration and its resilience. The consensus among psychoanalytic mystics that integration pertains to the total personality was shared by neither Hartmann nor Kohut, for whom integration was limited to the ego or self, respectively.
Kohut did not claim to be a mystic. He gave one interview where he expressed belief in God, but he was otherwise extremely reticent about personal matters. He kept secret, for example, that he was of Jewish descent. He was named Wolf Hersh in Yiddish at his circumcision in 19 13 and was bar mìtzvahed at the Mullnergasse synagogue in 1926. He fled Austria after the Nazi Anschluss in 1938. Many close friends at the University of Vienna during the 1930s were nevertheless unaware that he was Jewish, as were his colleagues at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. Kohut told no Jewish jokes, never spoke Yiddish, and appeared baffled when Jewish cultural traditions were mentioned. In Chicago, he attended the Unitarian Church in Hyde Park on a regular basis, befriended its minister, and sometimes spoke to the congregation (Strozìer, 2003, pp. 245, 252-53). The mystical character of self psychology must speak for itself.
Self psychology as a whole is explicitly concerned with narcissism, which it conceptualizes as a discrete developmental line that commences with primary narcissism and ends with the mature narcissism of adulthood. Self psychology may consequently be seen in its entirety as a psychology of the mystical. Kohut referred to mystical experiences only rarely. The principal discussion occurs in his 1966 article, "Forms and Transformations of Narcissism." Near the beginning of the essay, Kohut noted the versatility of narcissistic states: "In certain psychological states the...