How Does Analysis Cure?

By Heinz Kohut

Book Overview

The Austro-American psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut was one of the foremost leaders in his field and developed the school of self-psychology, which sets aside the Freudian explanations for behavior and looks instead at self/object relationships and empathy in order to shed light on human behavior. In How Does Analysis Cure? Kohut presents the theoretical framework for self-psychology, and carefully lays out how the self develops over the course of time. Kohut also specifically defines healthy and unhealthy cases of Oedipal complexes and narcissism, while investigating the nature of analysis itself as treatment for pathologies. This in-depth examination of "the talking cure" explores the lesser studied phenomena of psychoanalysis, including when it is beneficial for analyses to be left unfinished, and the changing definition of "normal."

An important work for working psychoanalysts, this book is important not only for psychologists, but also for anyone interested in the complex inner workings of the human psyche.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226450341
• ISBN13: 9780226450346
• Release Date: June 1984
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 254 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

To understand the "cure" one must understand the meaning...

This is one of the most difficult of Kohut's books, published posthumously with the assistance of one of the most talented analysts of this period: Arnold Golberg. The book is a compendium of Kohut's theories and techniques as well as a defense of the innovations he introduced when he wrote "The Analysis" (of the self) and "The Restoration" (of the self, of course). For anyone who deals with the narcissism of borderline patients, as-if personalities and eating and its disorders I can not think of a better source of enlightment and wisdom than reading: The Analysis, The Restoration, How does (it) cure? and finally, Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst. As a lay person you should feel gratified. As a therapist, you should feel reward it.

the cure is not the cause

kohut takes the self object theory one further and reinterprets from this lens such great iconographs as the oedipal complex. compelling read, with a bit of denseness good for twisting through the labyrinths of the human mind..