Seven The Cosmic Narcissism of Heinz Kohut Heinz Kohut, the founder of self psychology, regarded his work as an out- growth of Heinz Hartmann’s formulations of ego psychology, and Hart- mann agreed. Long after his break with ego psychology, Kohut (1990b) reminisced: “I am very happy that he [Hartmann] still read the manuscript of my Analysis of the Self (1971) and gave it his approval” (p. 285). Like Hartmann’s ego psychology, Kohut’s self psychology limited the contents of the unconscious to psychic energies and allocated all ideation and mental structure to consciousness. Kohut’s concept of the cohesion of the self re- cast Thomas M. French’s characterization of ego strength in terms of the ego’s integration and its resilience. The consensus among psychoanalytic mystics that integration pertains to the total personality was shared by nei- ther Hartmann nor Kohut, for whom integration was limited to the ego or self, respectively. Kohut did not claim to be a mystic. He gave one interview where he expressed belief in God, but he was otherwise extremely reticent about personal matters. He kept secret, for example, that he was of Jewish de- scent. He was named Wolf Hersh in Yiddish at his circumcision in 1913 and was bar mitzvahed at the Mullnergasse synagogue in 1926. He fled Austria after the Nazi Anschluss in 1938. Many close friends at the University of Vienna during the 1930s were nevertheless unaware that he was Jewish, as were his colleagues at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. Kohut told no Jewish jokes, never spoke Yiddish, and appeared baffled when Jewish cul- tural traditions were mentioned. In Chicago, he attended the Unitarian Church in Hyde Park on a regular basis, befriended its minister, and some- times spoke to the congregation (Strozier, 2003, pp. 245, 252-53). The mys- tical character of self psychology must speak for itself. Self psychology as a whole is explicitly concerned with narcissism, which it conceptualizes as a discrete developmental line that commences with primary narcissism and ends with the mature narcissism of adulthood. Self psychology may consequently be seen in its entirety as a psychology of the mystical. Kohut referred to mystical experiences only rarely. The prin- cipal discussion occurs in his 1966 article, “Forms and Transformations of Narcissism.” Near the beginning of the essay, Kohut noted the versatility of 190 EXPLORATIONS OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MYSTICS narcissistic states: “In certain psychological states the self may expand far beyond the borders of the individual, or it may shrink and become identical with a single one of his actions or aims” (p. 429). Expansions of the self to become co-extensive with all being, or the perceptible cosmos, and its shrinkage to become nothingness, are classical varieties of mystical experi- ence. The article’s major consideration of mysticism, which speaks of the self’s “participation in a supraindividual and timeless existence,” may be quoted in full. More difficult still, however, than the acknowledgment of the impermanence of object cathexes is the unqualified intellectual and emotional acceptance of the fact that we ourselves are im- permanent, that the self which is cathected with narcissistic libido is finite in time. I believe that this rare feat rests, not simply on a victory of autonomous reason and supreme objectivity over the claims of narcissism, but on the creation of a higher form of nar- cissism. The great who have achieved the outlook on life to which the Romans referred as living sub specie aeternitatis do not display resignation and hopelessness but a quiet pride which is of- ten coupled with mild disdain of the rabble which, without being able to delight in the variety of experiences life has to offer, is yet afraid of death and trembles at its approach.... Only through an acceptance of death, Goethe says here, can man reap all that is in life....I have little doubt that those who are able to achieve this ultimate attitude toward life do so on the strength of a new, expanded, transformed narcissism: a cosmic narcissism which has transcended the bounds of the individual. Just as the child’s primary empathy with the mother is the precursor of the adult’s ability to be empathic, so his primary identity with her must be considered the precursor of an expan- sion of the self, late in life, when the finiteness of individual exis- tence is acknowledged. The original psychological universe, i.e., the primordial experience of the mother, is “remembered” by many people in the form of the occasionally occurring vague re- verberations known by the term “oceanic feeling” (Freud, 1930, pp. 64-73). The achievement--as the certainty of eventual death is fully realized--of a shift of the narcissistic cathexes from the self to a concept of participation in a supraindividual and timeless exis- tence must also be regarded as genetically predetermined by the child’s primary identity with the mother. In contrast to the oce- anic feeling, however, which is experienced passively (and usually .