Heinz Kohut - Early Life

Early Life

Kohut was born on 3 May 1913, in Vienna, Austria, to Felix Kohut and Else Kohut (née Lampl). He was the only child of the family. The parents were assimilated Jews living in Alsergrund, or the Ninth Disctrict, and they had married two years previously. The father was an aspiring concert pianist, but he abandoned his dreams having been traumatized by his experiences in World War I and moved into business with a man named Paul Bellak. The mother opened her own shop sometime after the war, something that few women would do at the time in Vienna. The mother’s relationship with the son can be described as “narcissistic enmeshment”.

Kohut was not put into school until the fifth grade. Before that he was taught by several tutors, a line of “Fräuleins and mademoiselles”. Special care was taken that he learned French. From 1924 on he attended the Döblinger Gymnasium in Grinzing or the 19th District, where the Kohuts would build a house. During his time at the school he had one more tutor, but the role of this person was to engage him in educational discussions, to take him to museums, galleries, and the opera. This man was the first friend in his life. Before that he had been isolated from his peers by his mother.

At school a special emphasis was given to the Greek and Latin languages and Greek and Roman literature. Kohut also came to appreciate Goethe, Thomas Mann and Robert Musil.

In 1929 Kohut spent two months in Saint-Quay-Portrieux in Brittany, in order to study French. At school he wrote his thesis on Euripides’ play The Cyclops. His Latin teacher, who had anti-Semitic sentiments and later participated in the Austrian Nazi movement, accused him of having plagiariazed this work. The thesis was accepted after Kohut’s father intervened.

Kohut entered the medical faculty of the University of Vienna in 1932. His studies took six years, during which time he spent six months in internships in Paris, first at the Hôtel-Dieu and then at the Hôpital Saint-Louis. The latter hospital was specialized in the treatment of syphilis, which provided shocking experiences for Kohut. In Paris he began acquainted with Jacques Palaci, a Jewish medical student from Istanbul, and paid a visit to him in 1936. The following year Kohut’s father died of leukemia. Sometime after this Kohut went to psychotherapy with a man named Walter Marseilles, who does not seem to have been very competent at his trade. Early in 1938 Kohut began a psychoanalysis with August Aichhorn, a close friend of Sigmund Freud.

After Austria was annexed to Germany by Hitler on 12 March 1938, and the new regime meant difficulties for Kohut, as he still had to take his final exams at the medical faculty. He was eventually allowed to take them, after all the Jewish professors had been removed from the university. The Nazis then effectively confiscated all property owned by Jews. The property had to be sold at much less than its real value, and much of the rest was taken by the state in taxes. Kohut eventually left Austria, landing first in a refugee camp in Kent, England. Many of his relatives, who had stayed behind, were subsequently killed in the Holocaust.

In February 1940 he was allowed to travel in a British convoy to Boston, from where he travelled to Chicago by bus. A friend from Vienna, Siegmund Levarie, who had earlier emigrated to live with an uncle in Chicago and would subsequently be a famous musicologist in the United States, arranged a visa for him and invited him to join him there.