Psychotherapy Theories and Heinz Kohut’s Mr. Z Case

Muyesser Anar / Psychological Counselor Psychotherapy Institute of Turkey muyesseranar@hotmail.com

In this study, it is aimed to have an overview of the change process of psychotherapy theories that started with Heinz Kohut. The concept of paradigm, which was used for the first time in Kuhn’s classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1970, is a wide intellectual framework. Psychotherapy theories developed for nearly 100 years have been shaped within this framework. Studies in the scientific perspective in psychology started with the psychology laboratory established by Wilhelm Wundt in 1879 and continued with Freud’s Drive Theory, which states that the source of our behavior is impulsive.

The process evolving from single-person therapies to two-person therapies, which includes the psychoanalysis devel- oped by Freud, Self-Psychology, Object Relations Theories, Interpersonal Theory, Theories of the Self and Attachment Theories, shows a parallel development with the process evolving from Newtonian Physics to Quantum Physics. While single-person therapies try to adapt the individual to the theory, two-person therapies try to adapt the theory to the individual (Okçu C., 2022). To this end, two-person therapies accept that each person is unique like a fingerprint.

Although the concept we call the self seems to be a more used concept in analytical psychotherapies since Melanie Klein and Ronald Fairbairn, with the definition of Heinz Kohut, it started the transition process from single-person psychotherapy theories to two- person psychotherapy theories. Two-person therapies Carl Gustave Jung said, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemicals. If there is any reaction, both are transformed.’’ As in the statement, the psychotherapy process changes both the client and the therapist (Pulat F., 2019). Heinz Kohut wanted to liberate psychoanalysis from its bondage in the metapsychology of impulses (Özakkaş T., 2022). For this, he said that the essence of the psychoanalytic method is to look at the meaning of the root causes of the disease instead of looking for the root causes of the disease, and paved the way for it to evolve into valuable studies such as today’s rela- tional psychotherapy, the intersubjective field and structures based on neurobiological developments (Pulat F., 2019).

Keywords: Paradigm, Single-Person Therapy, Two-Person Therapy, Heinz Kohut.