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Professor of history at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, Charles B. Strozier, AM'67, PhD'71, is also a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Training and Research Institute for Self Psychology. Both sets of skills come into play in his new biography, Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

In 1939 Heinz Kohut (1913-1981) fled to the U.S. from Austria, where he had trained as a physician. He would spend the rest of his life in Hyde Park, leading the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis and teaching at the U of C. Responding to what he saw as limitations in classical psychoanalysis, Kohut developed his own theories. More empathetic and relational than the Freudian model, self psychology-explained in The Analysis of the Self (1971)-would change the course of American psychoanalysis.

Author of Lincoln's Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings (1982, 2001) and Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America (1994), Strozier analyzes Heinz Kohut's work and life in telling detail. - M.R.Y.

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