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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This chapter explores the evolution of Heinz Kohut’s ideas away from Freud’s tripartite and fragmented model of psychic structure and Kohut’s development of a holistic psychology of self. Kohut argues that a self’s continuity across a life span points to nuclear understanding of self, as opposed to an agglomeration of selves states or internalized objects. This chapter elaborates further on Kohut’s idea of a virtual self giving rise developmentally to a nuclear self. His use of the term nuclear self presents a model of understanding development and experience as paradoxically enduring and yet continually morphing. In Kohut’s formulation of self, human suffering is born of self fragmentation rather than thwarted drive energies. Clinical and historical examples are provided to examine Kohut’s ideas of self when seen in distress and in health.

This chapter provides a close study of Heinz Kohut’s idea of the self-state dream. Dreams have long been of great interest in psychoanalysis. Freud’s theory that distinguished the latent thoughts from the manifest content and privileges the unconscious dimension of dreams has dominated thinking in the field. Although he never wrote a paper or book about dreams, Kohut’s ideas about self-state dreams represent something new to psychoanalytic dream theory. His theory of self-state dreams interprets dreams within a vocabulary of self, noting the dream itself and its relation to self experience. The chapter elaborates the categories of self-state dreams and includes a link to an appendix and a database of all dreams mentioned in Kohut’s writings, along with the dreams of patients whose analysts were in supervision with Kohut and a few other dreams Kohut analyzes in literature and history.