ABSTRACT
This third installment of material from the Kohut Archives at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis includes a range of letters from Kohut’s life and work. The selection begins with a 1965 letter to Harry Slochower that indicates the depth of Kohut’s appreciation for the subtleties of interpreting literature psychoanalytically. The letter to E. James Anthony is light but shows Kohut’s appreciation for eloquence. The 1968 telegram to his friend, Alexander Mitscherlich, is part of Kohut’s abiding respect for Mitscherlich’s role in the recreation of psychoanalysis in Germany after the war. Kohut had a practice of sending telegrams to his older psychoanalytic friends on their birthdays. The two letters to Lester Schwartz in 1974 are an unusual opportunity to witness Kohut discussing a case, since Thomas A. Kohut (on his father’s orders) destroyed all obvious references to case material in the correspondence before a complete set of copies was turned over to the Institute in 1994. The letters to Louis Shapiro, Tilmann Moser, and Bernard Brandchaft are from Kohut’s abundant supply of letters to friends and colleagues in the 1970s. He kept up a prodigious correspondence in these years.
