ABSTRACT
The task of evaluating Heinz Kohut’s “self psychology” some five years after his death is particularly difficult for me, because I was Kohut’s earliest adherent as well as the person he looked upon as the first apostate from his cause. Heinz never mastered his sense of betrayal as a result of my inability to become his disciple; this unspoken reproach was conveyed only in the tears of his widow when I belatedly offered her my condolences. Gallantly, she said that the outcome was not anyone’s fault: “It could not be helped.” And she asked me whether I had any idea of how much I had meant to her husband. Yes, I did.
