ABSTRACT
There are few figures in the psychoanalytic community since Freud's time as personally alive, intellectually brilliant, and multifaceted as Heinz Kohut. After a lonely childhood in Vienna, where he was born in 1913 and which he left in 1939 to escape the Nazis, he would become a leading figure in mainstream psychoanalysis in the 1950s and 1960s. It is striking how "Christian" a stance Kohut assumes in the Randall interviews. He talks of churches and ministers and the rhythms of the holidays from Christmas to Easter. At one point, he has a long disquisition on Catholicism, at another on the meaning of the search for the historical Jesus. The whole discourse is Christian. There is no qualification that enlarges the dialogue to include other religions, especially Judaism. Contradictions, however, as Kohut recognized, spur creativity. His own confusions about his Jewish identity led him to think more deeply about the nature of religion itself.
