During 1990-91 I will edit the correspondence of Heinz Kohut (1913-1981) for publication. Kohut was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago, director of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, and president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He pioneered the analysis and treatment of narcissistic disorders and originated the school of self psychology. Kohut was concerned about what he called """"""""tool and method pride"""""""" among professionals, worrying that disciplinary specialization, while expanding scientific knowledge, was exalting the technical means of knowledge in the health sciences at the expense of the moral and humanistic ends of medicine. Thus, while insisting on scientific precision in psychoanalytic practice, Kohut celebrated the special reliance of psychoanalysis on human empathy to gain insight into the complex dynamics of intra- and interpsychic processes. Kohut established a broad reputation inside and outside the field of mental health through his two seminal books of the 1970s, The Analysis of the Self (1971) and The Restoration of the Self (1977). In 1978 a collection of his papers (and a very few letters from 1961-1978) was published by one of his students, Paul Ornstein, and in 1985 historian Charles Strozier edited another collection of writings, Self Psychology and the Humanities. Kohut's correspondence from 1939, the year he left his native Austria, to 1981 is a vital source for the history of psychoanalysis and the field of mental health in general, especially in the United States, since 1945. Oxford University Press has expressed a strong interest in publishing the anticipated one-volume edition of letters. The editing of the letters, almost all of them typed, in English, and filed in alphabetical and chronological order, can be accomplished during 1990-91.
