I am grateful for being included among the group of people to whom you sent your article about this important history.
Even though I am someone totally “outside” of NYPSI and the decades of controversy in which you participated, and I don't know, or even recognize the names of, many of the people involved, I found it fascinating.
I fully agree that politics is about relationships.
Reading the article, I was impressed to find out the names of your very eminent instructors, psychoanalytic thinkers who shaped psychoanalytic thought and psychoanalytic history.
Every organization, every discipline, has its political dilemmas, discords, difficulties. So, though the particulars of the controversy in which you were so deeply engaged are not anything I have experienced, I've certainly experienced enough political challenges in my psychoanalytic life. Elitism seems to be at the core, always some version or other of “my side is better than your side,” echoing the squabbles of childhood. Alas, all too often, some very real, important issues are involved….
Of course, I read your article through my own lens, my own experiences, and, my own biases. When I read about the émigrés who escaped Nazi Europe and found a home in New York, naturally I thought of Theodor Reik, whom Freud called his “spiritual son” (!!!), and for whom he wrote his 1927 essay, “The Question of Lay Analysis,” which was a defense of Reik. Reik came to New York in 1938. Of course, you know all this history very, very well. I will summarize elements of that history for others, elements that were crucial in shaping my life.
Since Reik was not a physician, he was not accepted by the members of
NYPSI. Many people who were psychologists were eager to study him, and he held private seminars for them. Those seminars led to the formation of a psychoanalytic training institute, the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP). NPAP accepts people with a graduate degree in any discipline. I am one of many people who had the opportunity to get a psychoanalytic education at NPAP, and to become a psychoanalyst. And I am grateful that you have defended not only psychologists, but all who become psychoanalysts, whatever their academic backgrounds and credentials.
That “spiritual son” comment caught my attention because I know that Freud wrestled with his interest in spirituality, his interest in the occult, a hint of which we get in his 1919 essay “Das Unheimlich” (The Uncanny), and his 1933 Lecture XXX, “Dreams and Occultism.” I recently read, and was enraptured by, The Emergence of Analytic Oneness: Into the Heart of Psychoanalysis, by Israeli analyst Ofra Eshel (Routledge, ). Truly brilliant. One chapter is called “Where are you, my beloved? On absence, loss, and the enigma of telepathic dreams” (pp. 117-146), where she discusses in depth Freud's interest in telepathy. She is a scholar, her review of the literature is impressive, and her ideas are original.
Since Jacob Arlow and Charles Brenner are widely known, and revered, for their writings (their co-authored book Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory is a classic), it is a bit startling to read about the way they were perceived during the fractious time at NYPSI. I am glad that you and Arlene both benefitted, each in unique ways, of course, from your encounters with them, as friends, and, in Arlene's case, one as a friend and one as an analyst.
I was baffled by Phyllis Greenacre's rigidity concerning Charles Brenner's letter to the NY Times about the Viet Nam War. I can't conceive of the transference as being so fragile, so tenuous, that any knowledge of anything about one's analyst could destroy the transference. Transference is so powerful, and persists forever and a Wednesday, even in the best analyzed people. The template of transference is laid down in infancy and childhood, and vestiges always remain. Encounters with the reality of the analyst will not shake the transference. Analysis, though, will make the unconscious conscious (I think that's true, I read it in a book, right?), and making the unconscious conscious offers new possibilities…. We
learn to recognize our own transferences, and we manage to say, “That was then, this is now,” as we strive to turn ghosts into ancestors.
Here's a story I may have shared with you before: Alice Entin, an NPAP psychoanalyst, also practices psychodrama. I attended a workshop she gave in which she told an anecdote concerning an analysand whom she saw three times a week in analysis, on the couch, and who was a member of a psychodrama group she led that met once a week. She said that even if, in a psychodrama group, she had been down on all fours, barking like a dog, once back in the analytic situation, the transference was totally intact.
Early on you mentioned in your article something about analysis being useful in dealing with ulcerative colitis. Here's an anecdote from my own life—my pre-analysis life!—that confirms the relationship between certain somatic conditions and analysis. In my 20's, when I was an abandoned wife with three very young children, no child support, no college degree, when my children yearned for their missing father, who never visited, never sent birthday cards to them, I was, as you can imagine, truly stressed. Not overwhelmed, I don't seem to get overwhelmed, but I certainly do get stressed. I occasionally had migraines, and I had just been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. A friend said to me that migraines and colitis were “neurotic symptoms.” Oh. Oh, I thought. If they were neurotic symptoms, I told myself, then I will give them up and accept whatever other neurotic symptoms I might develop instead.
And guess what…. I no longer had migraines, nor episodes of colitis.
“Neurotic symptoms.” The little I knew about psychoanalysis was based on my reading of A.A. Brill's translations of several of Freud's essays when I was a teenager, which my working class, self-educated parents had in their library, and my joy in reading Man and His Symbols by Jung, because the Jung book had such beautiful color illustrations, and his interest in mythology touched my poetic core.
Fortunately, in the 50 years that passed since I “traded somatizations for other neurotic symptoms,” I found a psychoanalyst with whom I could work, decided I too might become a psychoanalyst, enrolled, on recommendation from my psychoanalyst in the institute from which she had graduated, and, eventually, become a psychoanalyst myself. I attended
the “Brain, Mind, Body” Symposium series you sponsored in 2015 in New York City, enjoyed the range of presentations by psychoanalysts from various backgrounds, and was greatly honored when you invited me to present at the Symposium.
Seeing the history of the politics of psychoanalysis through your lens, through your perspective, based on your experience and scholarly knowledge, I am grateful for your activism, your willingness to share, and your vision that is shaping the future.
Thank you for the precious emerging future….