ABSTRACT
Kohut died on October 8, 1981, three days after extemporaneously delivering his presentation, 'On Empathy' (1981), to the Fifth Annual Conference on Self Psychology held at Berkeley, California. Approaching the conference, Kohut knew death was imminent and that this presentation would be his last. What would he choose to discuss? What issue merited his last words? Curiously, he returned to the topic of empathy, the seminal topic he introduced in his 1959 paper. Why did he do this?
