White and Columbia: Intersection … Union

I Came to Psychoanalytic Training at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in 1968, already significantly influenced by the interpersonal tradition. As a psychiatric resident at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, much of what I was taught about the intensive therapy of more disturbed patients came from interpersonalists, especially Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Rcichmann, Otto Will, Margaret and Janet Rioch, and many others. I was intrigued by the conferences I attended at Chestnut Lodge and seriously considered further training there, as had some of my colleagues. Alas, the United States Public Health Service (in Lexington, Kentucky), followed by my return to New York City, and psychoanalytic training intervened.

Of course, connections to White went back even further, to my reading Erich Fromm and Rollo May. As an undergraduate, I became very caught up in a paper I wrote on the possibility of being a “cheerful robot” for a course with C. Wright Mills. Fromm's (1941) Escape from Freedom had touched me deeply. I've just now made the connection between Fromm's writing and David Shapiro's (1981) Autonomy and Rigid Character, as focusing the wish to relinquish autonomy. I find this emphasis on surrendering autonomy very helpful in teaching candidates about obsessional and masochistic psychopathology, especially what it's like to analyze someone who doesn't want to feel and desire. And White had Fromm, May, Arieti, Schachtel, and others who loved to write, which I envied and wanted to emulate. When I was a psychiatric resident, because of his skill as a writer, Alan Wheelis was a hero of mine. As a writer, not as a psychoanalyst, Wheelis seemed like an interpersonal explorer. You may not realize that Baltimore analysts then did not write. They saw themselves as somewhat-Southern gentlemen (largely) who would reflect on the psychoanalytic literature evenings over cognac. Hans Loewald suppos