[The politicization of narcissism: Reading Kohut with and through Morganthaler]

While in the US in the 1970s, Heinz Kohut's work served as a major rescue operation for a psychoanalytic profession that was in deep crisis, the reception in the German-speaking lands was, for multiple reasons, ultimately marked by far more ambivalence. No one explicated and defended Kohut more vigorously to his professional peers as well as to a younger generation of left-leaning psychoanalysts than the charismatic Swiss psychoanalyst (and coinventor of ethnopsychoanalysis) Fritz Morgenthaler. It was, furthermore, specifically in engaged grappling with Kohut's creative clinical innovations as well as his blind spots that Morgenthaler--as a close reading of their correspondence and respective writings shows--developed his own distinctive perspectives on the enduring riddle of how best to theorize the interrelationships between "the sexual" and other realms of existence. It was also in this context that Morgenthaler became the first European analyst of any nationality to articulate an eloquent rebuttal to the homophobic consensus that had become consolidated across the psychoanalytic diaspora since Freud's death.