ABSTRACT
A quarter of a century of Kohut's productive psychoanalytic life is readily demarcated into three periods. In the writings of the first period one can detect the themes that ultimately develop into three major lines of thought and then reach several nodal points. Kohut's scientific interests as a psychoanalyst were immediately engaged in all three of the areas just mentioned in a complex yet thoroughly integrated fashion. The narcissistic regression manifested by hypochondriacal preoccupations is clearly evident before Aschenbach recognizes his passionate longing for Tadzio. Kohut has always stressed the psychoeconomic concept of trauma, and he retained as useful some clinical-theoretical elements of E. L. Freud's "actual neurosis." Kohut's critique of Freud's mixing of biology and psychology in relation to his concepts of "life drive" and "death drive" is a good test of both the reliability and the usefulness of Kohut's emerging method.
