Bridge . . . a panoply of images comes to mind from towering, majestic expanses suspended over vast bodies of water to weather-beaten wooden planks over swollen creeks. However, the focus here is not on the link itself, but on the function of the linking. I live in a coastal town with a small island just off the coast. The bridge to the island is a length of a few 100 yards, and constructed in a manner that most who traverse it remain unaware that they are crossing over to an island. Though the bridge itself is rarely noticed, the function it performs has been transformative. Until the late thirties, pre-bridge, the island was a pristine natural habitat for birds and marine life with visitation only by an occasional fisherman or sailor. As the road linked mainland and island, the marshy aviary was developed into residential neighborhoods, shops and eateries, which have become integral to the landside community. Two communities, formerly isolated, were inextricably linked and transformed each by the other with the completion of the bridge.

Metaphorically, the image of a bridge can be applied to conceptually link separate and apparently isolated bodies of theory (e.g. Theories of Object Relations, Bridges to Self Psychology); as well as to a theorist's personal and cultural context and his theory (e.g. Faces in a Cloud). When a theory is linked to contexts from which it has emerged, a more variegated and nuanced understanding of the theory and its applications is possible. This perspective has informed my study as a candidate at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis.

In my second year of study at ICP, I was offered a class in Self Psychology. I learned that Heinz Kohut had graduated from the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute in the 1950's and had quickly risen to be recognized as one of its most influential members, one of the few who controlled the clinical and training operations of the Institute. It was Kohut who devised and taught the 2-year basic theory course for candidates. It was "completely Freudian". A biographer of Kohut reviewed several students' notes of Kohut's lectures, and concluded, "There is not a hint in these lectures of where Kohut would move later. He was in and of classical psychoanalytic theory" (Strozier, 2001, p. 130). He was viewed as "the respectable, cautious man of the future, assiduously cultivating his reputation as the chosen one to provide leadership for the next generation of psychoanalysts." Through the 1950's and 1960's, he was known as "Mr. Psychoanalysis" (Ibid.).

How had Kohut come to conceptualize psychoanalysis, its view of the basic nature of man and the curative process itself, in ways fundamentally different from classical or ego psychology in which he was ostensibly immersed? His theories were presented as springing de novo from his work with patients. To more systematically indulge this curiosity I took advantage of another aspect of training at my institute, the independent study. Students may create a course and individually study with a senior analyst. Dr. Estelle Shane is a senior and training analyst at my institute who had studied with Kohut. She agreed to read Kohut's early papers, letters, and lectures with me to explore possible bridges from Kohut's personal and professional history, which might more deeply and complexly link the man with his theories. Through my course of study with Dr. Shane, I offer several pillars upon which a bridge from Kohut as leader in classical psychoanalysis to creator of an original psychology of the self might tentatively begin to be constructed.

Kohut was the first to conceptualize the self as a supraordinate structure with a distinct and separate line of development (Bacal and Newman, 1990, p. 228). Kohut proffered that "it was possible to get along for so long without a psychology of the self in psychoanalysis because clinical psychoanalytic work dealt primarily with psychological states in which the self was comparatively quiescent, though always present and functioning . . .. The self in these instances is unconsciously present but not noticed. It begins to be noticed and becomes observable only when it is . . . torn, or disturbed in any of a variety of ways." (Kohut, 1975, p. 233)

Perhaps Kohut became more sensitized to the comparatively quiescent self through the profound disturbance of the continuity of his self during World War II[1]. Kohut grew up immersed in and completely identified with the rich cultural environment of Vienna. He was a successful medical student preparing to take his boards when the Nazis invaded Austria. Overnight, he "became radically devalued and a persona non grata" (Strozier, p. 55). Kohut described feeling that "it was the end of a world . . . I had the feeling that it was the end of my life . . .." (Ibid). Kohut "had it suddenly all taken away; his life lost meaning."(Ibid.).

This profound and sudden remove from all that was familiar was not followed by transplant to a strange land where he could immediately begin again to build a life and identity. Rather, he was to endure a year and half of waiting for transport to America. All opportunity to rebuild his life was held in abeyance. He was interred for a year in a camp in England where he felt "charred in the purgatory of camp life". When he contracted pneumonia, he was removed from the camp. He spent his last 5 months of waiting "lay[ing] in complete solitude, reading, sleeping, waking and sleeping again" (Op. Cit., p. 67).

One can only speculate upon the psychological impact of such a radical remove from his surround upon a sensitive, intelligent young man, who was given to attending to his internal world. When, almost thirty years later, Kohut began to write of the self, he articulated an awareness that might well have been stimulated by his own experience of the absence of a responsive and sustaining environment. Perhaps his experience of loss of continuity sensitized him to listen to and understand his patients' experiences in novel and more meaningful ways.

Though Kohut concluded that the self is essentially "something unknowable" (Kohut, 1975, p. 233), he conceptualized the self as a "unit, cohesive in space and enduring in time, which is a center of initiative and a recipient of impressions" (Kohut, 1977, p. 99) It is the silent and unnoticed predictability of the environment and being known by others that "sustains us in our sense of continuity, in our sense of the completeness of ourselves. And if there are very serious disruptions in that kind of support to the cohesion of ourselves, none of us would be totally protected against beginning to feel unreal, beginning to break apart." (Kohut, 1974, p. 95). He said further, "without even thinking about it, without being aware and having verbalizable fantasies about it, we know that certain things are predictable. We know that when we come into the building the man who runs the elevator will greet you and know your face . . .. You will come home and your wife and children will greet you, and your identity will be confirmed." (Ibid.). As a young man of 26, Kohut was removed from his predictable world where people would know his face and loved ones would greet him, perhaps making more salient for him the otherwise unnoticed experience of self as a unit in time and space.

Space does not permit me the indulgence to more completely describe multiple and complex influences upon which bridges from Kohut's past as classical analyst to future as original theoretician could be constructed. Perhaps exposition of these few trestles could incite one's interest to not accept any single body of theory or theoretical product of a single mind without exploring further the contexts from which it has emerged.

Endnotes

1. There were earlier, perhaps even more influential, disturbances of self-continuity for Kohut. Space here permits exposition of only one experience within a multiplicity of early experiences and influences which potentially influenced Kohut's transformation from Mr. Classical Psychoanalysis to Self Psychologist. [Return to text]

References

Bacal, H. and Newman, K., Theories of Object Relations: Bridges to Self Psychology. Columbia University Press: New York, 1990.

Kohut, H., "On the Therapeutic Alliance: Lecture 7", March 29, 1974, in The Chicago Institute Lectures, (P. and M. Tolpin, Eds), The Analytic Press: Hillsdale, Hew Jersey, 1996.

Kohut, H. "Consciousness, Unconsciousness, and the Self: Lecture 15", March 31, 1975.

Kohut, H., The Restoration of the Self. International Universities Press: New York, 1977.

Strozier, C., Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2001.

Stolorow, R, and Atwood, G., Faces in a Cloud: Subjectivity in Personality Theory. Jason Aronson: New York, 1979.