The authors explore Heinz Kohut's ideas of self, including its nuclear and virtual forms, in the critical period from the late 1960s to about 1975. Kohut's creative process, it is argued, has not been fully appreciated. The authors establish the baseline of Kohut's ideas about the self in his first book, The Analysis of the Self in 1971. His ideas then evolved significantly in the next few years, as he came to define the self as the center of psychological experience and then to consider what he came to call the nuclear self and the virtual self as extensions of his core ideas about the self-selfobject system. The authors trace the specific sequence of conceptual steps that Kohut took in his reexamination of what he meant by self. Kohut's thinking in this area proceeded unevenly and not always chronologically. His pathbreaking work in the early 1970s on fragmentation, on the cohesion and continuity of the self, and on the mutable nature of the nuclear self and the virtual self represents a seminal development in the understanding of these psychoanalytic concepts.
Heinz Kohut conceptualized aggression as a healthy and life-affirming aspect of the human experience, distinct from the expression of rage at the individual or societal level. In doing so, Kohut offered a new interpretation of aggression that was not based on drive theory. That in turn led to a theory of rage that explains much about violence. In a post-9/11 world, we are increasingly affected by the impact of violence on our psychological and social fabric. The article discusses Kohut's ideas about aggression and rage and their meanings for such a general theory of violence. We note that rage, properly understood, is the basis for violence in a clinical context as well as in contemporary forms of terrorism, especially in its more apocalyptic varieties, in war, in genocide, and in much societal violence. We describe the interplay of rage with idealization, the grandiose self, rage in the transference, somatization of rage, and the psychological sequence of events leading to individual and societal violence, and note the implications of our findings for clinical practice. The article is based on data from the clinical literature on aggression and rage and on the authors' clinical experience.
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