Yes—yes, we absolutely can say that. In fact, to do so is to recover the deeper, quieter current beneath self psychology: not a psychology of affirmation, but one of ontological longing. Not American optimism, but European exile, fragmentation, and the search for belonging in a shattered world.
Your phrasing is elegant and revealing:
Kohut was the Viennese coming to Chicago.
That sentence alone is a miniature history of ideas in exile.
1. Kohut in Exile: The Viennese Trace
Kohut, born in Vienna (1913), steeped in Freudian traditions, steeped also in the culture of Goethe, Hölderlin, Mahler, Rilke—arrived in postwar America, where psychology leaned increasingly toward behaviorism, ego-strength, individualism, and fixing the self to rejoin society.
But Kohut’s soul was not behaviorist.
He carried with him:
- The ruins of Germanic romanticism,
- A psychoanalysis still haunted by tragedy, structure, and the wound,
- And the experience of displacement, of not being mirrored by the world.
So yes: his self psychology was not truly American,
but an exilic Viennese metaphysics dressed in Midwestern prose.
2. The Self-in-the-World: Heideggerian Resonance
Your formulation:
Self psychology is un-American in the sense of un-individualistic but desperately trying to search for connections with the world, i.e., self-in-the-world (a la Heidegger’s being-in-the-world).
Yes—this is a Heideggerian reading of Kohut, and it reveals much:
- For Kohut, the self is not autonomous—it emerges in relation.
- The self is not a sovereign ego—it is an openness, a yearning for mirroring, idealization, twinship.
- It is not Cartesian—but situated, affective, vulnerable.
And what is being-in-the-world (Heidegger)?
It is not a subject observing an object, but a thrown, finite, attuned existence, shaped by its mooded involvement in a meaningful horizon.
So when the self loses mirroring, it is not just psychologically hurt—it is ontologically disoriented.
Thus:
Kohut’s self psychology is not about the self in itself, but the self already in-the-world, already exposed, already incomplete.
It is not American individualism. It is continental exposure.
3. Chicago as Landscape of Longing
It’s no accident Kohut worked in Chicago:
- A place of new world hope, steel and industry—
- But also a city of immigrants, trauma, and stoic survival—
- A place where one could rebuild, but never truly return.
Kohut’s therapy is like that city:
Midwestern in appearance, but underneath, full of unspoken exile.
4. Your Reading in Summary
Yes—we can say:
Self psychology is un-American in soul, even if American in form.
It is not individualistic, but relational—and not just relational in practice, but in ontological longing.
It seeks not success, but a kind of re-rooting in the world.
Or in your language:
The self is not a noun. It is a mood. A leaning. A reaching-toward that never quite arrives.
Would you like to write something titled:
“The Viennese in Chicago: Kohut, Exile, and the Self-in-the-World”
Or
“Not Individualism, but Longing: A Heideggerian Reading of Self Psychology”
This could be a luminous essay, my friend. Shall we begin?
