I had heard that Martin Bergmann (1913–2014) was a distinguished analyst, so as he walked down the center aisle of the conference hall in Berlin in 2007 and we silently passed each other, I thought to myself, “I wish I could have known him.” But I never did, and that is why Jane Hall's 1988 and 2008 interviews with him, published together in her book The Power of Connection (2022), was of special interest to me.
Jane's interview is casual yet informative, and it beautifully preserves the affection between a student and teacher. It's a lovely interview and has aspects that remind me of my clinical mentor, Nathan Adler (1911–1994). After reading Jane's interview, I found and read Fredric T. Perlman's outstanding article “Love and Its Objects: On the Contributions to Psychoanalysis of Martin S. Bergmann” (Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. 86, No. 6, 1999). In it I discovered that Bergmann's father, Hugo Bergmann, was a philosopher and friend of Martin Buber and that Hugo Bergmann's son, Martin Bergmann (yes, named after Martin Buber), had been intrigued in his youth by a small book written by Siegfried Bernfeld (1892–1953) “on the application of psychoanalytic principles to the problem of educating children orphaned by war.” What is not stated in the Perlman article is that Bernfeld was Buber's assistant, later a psychoanalyst and close associate of Sigmund Freud in Vienna. After moving to San Francisco in 1937 Bernfeld became Nathan Adler's mentor—my mentor's mentor. As I read Jane Hall's interview of Martin Bergmann, I felt the teaching styles and psychoanalytic attitudes of Siegfried Bernfeld and Nathan Adler resonating in the background. Bernfeld, Bergmann, and Adler were all well known for their ability to speak about psychoanalysis eloquently and without notes. Of course, Freud had the same gift.
As an interesting aside, Arnold D. Richards, also a friend of Martin Bergmann, told me that Hugo Bergmann, the philosopher, and Gershom
Sholom, the famous scholar of Jewish mysticism, were friends and that at some point along the way they both divorced their wives, and each married the wife of the other. This, as Richards explained, angered Martin Bergmann and led to a special interest in the role of the mother in psychological development and the consequences of maternal loss.
Early in Jane's interview, Bergmann says, “I think the young analyst of today, whether they like it or not, is confronted with a multiplicity of models. If he decided to join a particular organization, he can be sure that he will be subjected, perhaps mercilessly, to the one model and would be discouraged from interest in the other models. I would urge the opposite” (all quotes from Hall and Bergmann are from her interview with him in The Power of Connection). His advice is for the student to learn as much as one can about the model one is first introduced to, “but afterwards explore the other models available. Because you'll always learn something from them. That is, I don't regard any deviant school as having nothing to contribute.” I like Bergmann's ecumenical approach to theory and have practiced it in my own professional development.
I think of models of the mind as “lenses,” as ways of looking at the psyche and the clinical situation. Each lens brings some things into high relief and recesses other things into low relief. The medical model highlights tissue damage, injuries, hormones, genetics, neurological structure, and biochemistry. The cognitive behavioral model highlights stimuli, responses, reinforced behaviors, cognitive maps, learning, and beliefs. The family systems model highlights family structure, roles, alliances, and communication patterns. The psychoanalytic model highlights unconscious motivations, defenses, object relations, resistances, transferences, and the repetition compulsion. And when Bergmann speaks of the analysts today being confronted by a multiplicity of models, he is, of course, speaking of the multiple models within the context of broader psychoanalytic theory, including ego psychology, object relations theory, self-psychology, modern conflict theory, the French school, and relational psychology. Accepting any one of them as a personal religion with its corresponding saints and mythologies is common practice, but it is a grave error. And, of course, when one accepts one theory as a religion along with it comes a stance against the enemy camps. It is a very common and highly unprofessional stance. Clinical thinking is critical thinking about clinical matters. From that perspective we need to ask
what explanatory power or utility each theory offers us in our work with our patients.
Bergmann says, “Many students today no longer understand Freud. So that I have to reiterate it in a language which is a little closer to them. This is particularly true with certain difficult books like The Ego and the Id. One has to read it almost line by line because the book is no longer accessible. So, the teacher has a fundamentally different task, and that is to act as a bridge between the students and what Freud said.” I found this refreshing to read. There are so many Freud bashers and detractors today that young students learn from their teachers that Freud was wrong and is passe before they ever even read his works. Bergmann describes himself as “a bridge between the students and what Freud said.” I think this is also the role some of the modern psychoanalytic writers serve today. They can talk about Freud and psychoanalysis in a modern language and a modern style that young people can better understand. Personally, I have always been fascinated and inspired by Freud's writings, but one of the most important bridge functions that I serve for my students is to emphasize how important it is to read Freud through a metaphoric lens. Most objections to psychoanalytic theory are literal interpretations of psychoanalytic concepts.
Jane Hall notes that psychoanalytic training is typically organized around analysis, supervision, and seminars; she also points out that Bergmann is well known for his seminars that took place every day of the week for decades. People often debate which of the three pillars is more important. I think the answer is very personal and may even change during one's life, but I have no doubt that Bergmann was an exceptional seminar leader and probably inspired curiosity in addition to teaching content.
In the interview, Bergmann also says, “Freud was interested in creating a science. A science is based on repetitive phenomena. Science does not prepare us for the unique and special, at least not in an obvious way. So that, to some extent, Freud's eagerness to have psychoanalysis recognized as a science tended to work against the recognition of the uniqueness of the analyst and the uniqueness of the patient.” This consideration gives us pause when evaluating psychoanalytic psychotherapy outcome studies, formalized psychoanalytic training, and the vicissitudes of supervision.
As a Ph.D. psychologist, Martin Bergmann didn't have the option of receiving his training at a standard American Psychoanalytic Association institute (which only accepted MD candidates at the time); instead, he sought unofficial training by entering analysis with Edith Jacobson and attending seminars led by Paul Federn, Theodor Reik, and Robert Waelder. Bergmann operated independently until 1952, when he was invited to teach at Reik's National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. Other opportunities for teaching within the American Psychoanalytic Association became possible for Bergmann after the 1988 lawsuit that opened up psychoanalytic training for non-M.D. analysts.
Siegfried Bernfeld, whom I mentioned earlier, was himself a psychologist and similarly made unauthorized analytic training available to Nathan Adler and a few others in San Francisco in the late 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. Adler was also a psychologist and not permitted formal institute training. I recall sitting next to Nathan in a meeting in which the implications of the 1988 lawsuit were being discussed. In the discussion, he stood up and delivered a mea culpa for not having launched the suit himself decades ago. He returned to his seat, next to me, and whispered, “Well, we know how the psychiatrists have ruined psychoanalysis; now we're going to find out how the psychologists will ruin it!”
Martin Bergmann's educational style is illuminated in Jane's interview, and it reminded me of the open and creative teaching style that Bernfeld described in his famous paper “On Psychoanalytic Training” (1962). It is a well-thought-out challenge to some of the consequences of institute training that he had encountered in Vienna, Berlin, and San Francisco. Bernfeld was an inspired teacher, an eloquent lecturer, and a passionate idealist who remained committed to the primary prerogatives of students and their freedom to grow despite the encroachments of bureaucratic institutions. He abhorred authoritarian administration-centered institutions that stifled students and their creativity. He had flourished in the Vienna and Berlin institutes primarily because they were new, unstructured, and he was free to teach as he saw fit. With the establishment of the American institutes, psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic training became formalized, and Bernfeld experienced these institutions as a constriction of the psychoanalytic ethos. In “On Psychoanalytic Training,” posthumously published in 1962, he presented a vision of another kind of a psychoanalytic institute. He described an institute that would be
student-centered and progressive in its teaching approach. There would be few formal requirements for admission other than a passionate interest and talent for psychoanalysis. Study would take place in small groups and attention would largely be on the interests of the individual students. The focus would not be on formal admission requirements or the fulfillment of prescribed educational tasks but on the interests and talents of each individual student, their relationship with the teacher, and the pursuit of their creative psychoanalytic work.
Based on Jane Hall's interview with Martin Bergmann, I could not help but recognize a style similar to what Siegfried Bernfeld had described and the manner in which he conducted the unofficial seminar that Nathan Adler had attended. Bergmann's studies with Federn, Reik, and Waelder certainly would have been informed by the same Viennese psychoanalytic spirit that Bernfeld had been immersed in.
Jane Hall asks Bergmann, “If you were a student today, just starting out, where would you find the best education in psychoanalysis? Would you find it in the institute, or would you find it in private seminars where the students could select different teachers for long periods of time?” And Bergmann replies, “I would hate to answer that question.”
What makes Jane's question so difficult to answer? I think the answer is that psychoanalytic training throws one into the unconscious dynamics of the group. These dynamics have indeed helped a few people to develop their psychoanalytic skills and build a career. But many coming out of North American traditions of the 20th century were infantilized or stunted in the process and others were frankly crushed by the experience.
What follows here may sound like a non sequitur but stay with me as it is a direct continuation of this theme of creative or oppressive psychoanalytic education. I have long been fascinated by the Oedipus complex, and my only critique is that it is often regarded too literally and not metaphorically enough. Aside from that, regarding the relationship between the Oedipus complex and American psychoanalytic organizations in the 20th century, I have observed that American psychoanalysis was significantly influenced by the same cultural trends that gave rise to the generation gap. It was the generation gap between the fathers, or
the establishment, and their sons, or the next generation, in American psychoanalytic organizations.
Now, I am an outsider to American psychoanalytic organizational life, but as a psychoanalytically oriented clinical psychologist, a colleague of many analysts, and, more importantly, as a psychoanalytic historian, I have observed the tendency of the fathers, or the leaders of American psychoanalytic institutes, to raise the standards that in turn raised the age of admissions to institutes. They found reasons to exclude candidates, reasons to keep them in training for seven, eight, nine, ten years, and to demand that candidates conform to the theoretical and technical demands of the fathers. The desires, ambitions, and creativity of the candidates were often seen as resistances, manifestations of the Oedipus complex, and efforts to kill the father. Thus, the American psychoanalytic fathers (the establishment) did their best to hold the candidates down without recognizing that the only way for psychoanalysis to continue would be for the fathers to teach the candidates well and pass the torch of psychoanalysis to the next generation. This tendency of the fathers, the organization, to stifle creativity, snuff out ambition, exclude candidates, hold back advancement, and in other ways limit the next generation of psychoanalysts is what I call a manifestation of the “Laius complex in American psychoanalysis.”
You may recall that Laius was Oedipus's father. But Laius had a history before Oedipus was even born. Laius was entrusted to teach a young boy, Chrysippus, how to drive a chariot, but instead of doing so, he raped the young boy. His punishment for this, as told to him by the Oracle, was that his firstborn son would kill him and marry his wife. So, when the time came and Laius's wife, Jocasta, gave birth, Laius decided to kill his own son by having his feet pinned and then taken out and left to die on a mountainside. Now, get this picture: Laius molested a young boy; tried but failed to have his infant son, Oedipus, killed on a mountainside; and years later when he met Oedipus on the road, he tried to kill him again! What a dad!
This, from my perspective, is what organized American psychoanalysis did in the second half of the 20th century. It was possessed by its Laius complex. It did its very best to hold down, exclude, and limit the creativity of the next generation, and by the 1980s they almost drove
psychoanalysis into extinction. And you know something interesting? They didn't do that in Latin America—and I don't think they do that so much anymore in the United States either. But I think in the second half of the 20th century it was fairly common, and it stunted psychoanalysis.
Nonetheless, there have been rare teachers like Siegfried Bernfeld, Nathan Adler, Arnold D. Richards, and, apparently Martin Bergmann as well, who had what I would call a “Polybus complex.” Polybus and Merope were the king and queen of Corinth, who adopted the infant Oedipus and kindly raised him to adulthood. Those with a Polybus complex are the teachers that run interference between Laius (the hostile teachers) and Oedipus (the students) in an effort to give psychoanalysis, and the next generation of psychoanalysts, a chance at a future.
Jane Hall asks, “What do you think people like about Bion? Bion seems to be so popular these days. There are study groups that are going on, Bionion, which I don't understand, but I feel I probably should know more about this.” To which Bergmann replies, “Why should you?… What is it that you don't understand about your patients that you think Bion could help you with?” Bergmann also refers to the way psychoanalysis has a history of writers giving new names to old concepts and acting like they had discovered a new school of thought. This is what Nathan Adler used to describe as “putting old wine in new bottles.”
In Jane Hall's interview, Bergmann makes several references to the importance of psychoanalytic history for the clinician. Bernfeld was also interested in psychoanalytic history and wrote some of the original articles on Freud's biography. Analysts who orient themselves to psychoanalytic history have a depth of understanding that transcends the latest fads in psychoanalysis. It enables them to recognize authentic extensions of psychoanalytic theory and differentiate them from the so-called innovations that are nothing more than old resistances to the radical and subversive nature of psychoanalysis.
I recall that when I began studying psychology in San Francisco, in 1972, it seemed that everyone was talking about Erik Erikson, Fritz Perls, and Carlos Castaneda. By 1975 there were posters on all the walls, even on telephone poles, advertising seminars and lectures on the work of C. G. Jung and Wilhelm Reich, which had become all the craze. By the
mid-1980s it was all about Kohut, Kernberg, and Masterson. By the late 1980s everyone seemed to be talking about British object relations and Lacan. Then came the fascination with Bion, and then came those who sought to integrate, compare, and contrast Bion with Winnicott and the French analysts. Then came the pandemic and the “tyranny of the real”—the external reality dominated, the real relationship became the focus, and the real analyst and the real training became the top concern. The tyranny of the real immediately excluded unconscious motivation, the Oedipus complex, and transference. What's next? Nathan Adler used to quote John Dewey, “Democracy has to be borne anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” He would then add that psychoanalysis has to be born anew in every generation as well. We should ask ourselves now, are we currently (2024) killing psychoanalysis or helping it to be born anew?
Jane also asks Bergmann about the tradition of exclusion in American psychoanalysis. He replies, “But when I wish to be included, and I am included, there is no guarantee that I won't say, ‘Well, now that I'm included, it is time to exclude.’ Because there is the wish to belong, but the wish also not to let anybody in.”
Bergmann's reflections naturally remind me of the tendency of psychoanalytic societies to split in two, which W. Ernest Freud described as a process of mitosis. It also reminds me of the old Sephardic saying, “Two Jews, three temples.”
Jane continues with the line of questioning about exclusion and the way that students, as a group, sometimes become annoyed with one student in the seminar. Bergmann replies, “That happens many times. The class combines against a particular member of the class and wants the teacher to do something about it.”
“So, what happens then?” she asks. Bergmann replies, “You explain to the class that this is the phenomenon of aggression, and if you exclude this culprit, another culprit will appear. So, we might as well deal with this culprit… . I remember that I realized this in the army. Every company had to have a scapegoat. But who was chosen as the scapegoat was determined by certain psychological conditions.”
Jane asks, “Masochism?” Bergmann replies, “Masochism, intelligence, not fighting back. There are certain things.”
Reading this short list of characteristics that predispose one to exclusion, I began to reflect on the history of psychoanalysis, and it seems to me that some of the most famous exclusions of individuals from psychoanalytic organizations were people who were extremely creative, unique, perhaps a bit odd, and some with a voracious hunger for knowledge.
My musings on Jane's interview with Martin Bergmann are simply my own reflections on the themes raised in the interview. What is not captured in my musings is how Bergmann was obviously such a brilliant analyst and also such a mensch—such a regular guy. Also not captured in my musings is the affection between Jane, the loving student, and Bergmann, the loving teacher. I finished reading their dialogue still wishing I had met Bergmann but feeling that through Jane Hall's beautiful interview I had, in a sense, met him. And for that I am very grateful.