ABSTRACT
The curve of psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut's life began in Vienna on May 3, 1913 and ended in Chicago on October 8, 1981. The conception of the course of human life as a curve was his own. The image and shape of a curve embrace Kohut's critique not only of Freud's notion of "the child as father to the man", but also of the Western tradition of what in a letter to a colleague in 1978 he called "fearless self-sufficiency". Kohut rejected the biological aspect of psychoanalysis that sees human life as a struggle between sexual and aggressive drives and the social environment. For Kohut psychoanalysis was a pure psychology dealing with the experiential rather than with the biological. Moreover, Kohut argued that psychoanalysis had imbibed a peculiarly modern Western ideal of independence while self psychology had shown the ongoing importance of human relationships in the development of character.
