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Heinz Kohut Quotes

Empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person.

Empathy is the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person.

Heinz Kohut
Thinking, Empathy, Capacity
Heinz Kohut (2009). “How Does Analysis Cure?”, p.82, University of Chicago Press

...man can no more survive psychologically in a psychological milieu that does not respond empathetically to him, than he can survive physically in an atmosphere that contains no oxygen.

Heinz Kohut
Sympathy, Men, Compassion

If there is one lesson that I have learned during my life as an analyst, it is the lesson that what my patients tell me is likely to be true - that many times when I believed that I was right and my patients were wrong, it turned out, though often only after a prolonged search, that my rightness was superficial whereas their rightness was profound.

Heinz Kohut
Truth, Believe, Profound
Heinz Kohut (2009). “How Does Analysis Cure?”, p.93, University of Chicago Press

The empathic understanding of the experience of other human beings is as basic an endowment of man as his vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell

Heinz Kohut
Men, Smell, Empathy
Heinz Kohut (2012). “The Restoration of the Self”, p.144, University of Chicago Press

The musician of disordered sound, the poet of decomposed language, the painter and sculptor of the fragmented visual and tactile world: they all portray the break up of the self and, through the rearrangement and reassemble of the fragments, try to create new structures that possess wholeness, perfection, new meaning.

Heinz Kohut
Self, Perfection, Trying

The mark of a good marriage is when only one of you goes crazy at a time!

Heinz Kohut
Crazy, Good Marriage, Mark

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