IJCD 3B(2):79-102 (2025)

Conversations with Arlene Kramer Richards

AKR	During my years in College, I slowly realized that I had problems and that I was doing some things that were good for me and some that were self-defeating, and I knew then that I needed treatment. I got into a psychotherapy with someone whom my parents friends recommended. I had a few sessions with him because I was going back to school.
	That was during the summer break of the first year in college, and he was really terrible. He was much dumber than I was, and he knew it, and I knew it, and that didn't work at all. For example, I came in wearing a white shirt that was tailored like a man's shirt, and he said to me, ‘you have penis envy.’ In the first session! As if he spoke to a five-year-old in a first interview and his evidence was that I was wearing this tailored white shirt.
MSK	That's quite a ‘deep’ interpretation. Was he a psychoanalyst?
AKR	He was rejected from New York Psychoanalytic. So, he was a psychotherapist of a kind, psychoanalyst of a maverick kind. He called himself a psychoanalyst, but he was someone who had not had full analytic training. I think he had gone to some courses. Whatever he was, he sure was someone who was very insecure about being dumb and yet I did get something out of it just talking to him. I learned some things about myself just from hearing myself talk, just as I am learning as I am talking to you.
MSK	Yes.
AKR	I think the method is so good that even someone who isn't good at it can do very good work sometimes. Anyways, I stuck with it till it was time to go back to school, and said, thank you very much, and left and did better from then on. Page 79
	Later on I got into analysis with Arlow. It was during my own analysis that I got interested in becoming a psychoanalyst. I had known for many years that I was so depressed, and I had to work very hard to fight against the depression. I had to work all the time; I did so many things and the time had come when my husband was finishing his analysis so it looked like we might have enough money for me to start.
	And the impetus finally came one day when I was crossing the street, and a big truck came to a screeching halt before hitting me. The truck driver leaned out of the window and said to me ‘what's the matter with you lady, you're trying to get killed and it'll be my fault?’
	So, he made a very serious interpretation, and I understood the seriousness of the situation. I was in graduate school at the time trying to work on my dissertation and I had very mixed emotions about finishing the dissertation and being able then to get a job in the academic world which I wanted. But I understood that if I got a job in the academic world it wasn't going to be in New York City. You don't start out that way, you start out at small college. But my husband was very involved in the New York Psychoanalytic and in his practice and he wasn't moving anywhere.
	Thus, it seemed like I had to choose between an academic life and my family, and I chose my family but that made me very sad about finishing my dissertation and having nowhere to go after that.
MSK	In some ways you're analytic journey kind of starts in an interesting way because most people that I know who are in analytic training, are also doing psychotherapy and psychiatry and so forth. You're doing something very different as work, so that gives an interesting perspective. I would think eventually it could have been enriching because you have a foot outside of the potentially constraining, almost monochromatic life of working in psychotherapy and becoming a psychoanalyst. Most of the times our professional lives just consist of those very related and to a degree, narrow fields. Page 80
AKR	Yes and luckily enough I did take a few courses that were useful. One in this psychology of Piaget, who was himself analyzed although he wasn't an analyst and whose interest in how children learn fit in with my interest. That had developed in college; about how we know anything, about the philosophy of science, about how do we find things out. There were other thinkers about child psychology in particular who were thinking about how children learn, and this is related to how scientists learn. The development of curiosity, the development of skepticism, the development of becoming part of a community of learners. Interaction with people who have the same kinds of questions in mind so it fit together very well, except that I felt I still wasn't meeting my parents' expectations that I should be a woman whose husband supports her.
	By now Arnie was a doctor, and he had gone through analytic training, I had completed my graduate studies and so I was very conflicted about continuing my career and how I wanted to do it. I knew Edith Jacobson and I called her and asked her if I could come in and see if I could become a patient and she said she was sorry but she didn't have any time. I was crushed. I couldn't think of another woman analyst who I knew. I wanted a woman analyst.
	As a context, at that time my son was 12 years old, and he was preparing for his bar mitzvah. This had been a very difficult time for me because I felt he was like moving into the world of being a man and not my little boy anymore. And all the years that Arnie had been working so hard and his schooling and everything, I had become very close with Stephen. I really cared about him a lot and the thought that it was better for him not to be that close with me was very sad for me. It was sad because it resonated with the story of my life. I didn't understand this at the time, but it resonated with having left my poor little brother behind when I went off to university and I left him behind with my parents who I knew were not fit parents. I felt very guilty about the big turn approaching—here Stephen was going off to be a man.
	Arnie told me that a Dr. Arlow who was at the New York Psychoanalytic had recently written a very good paper about bar Page 81 mitzvah in which he understood some of this and maybe that would be the right person for me to approach next.
	I read the paper. It made sense to me. It's a very nice paper and I went for an interview with Doctor Arlow, and I explained that I had wanted such help for a long time but couldn't afford to and was busy supporting my family. I was a schoolteacher and all that, and now I had enough money to have an analysis, and I certainly needed it because I understood this deep underlying depression was not good and was going to get me killed eventually if I kept up going on like this.
	He said, how did you come to me, and I said, “Well my husband was a student of yours and he told me about this paper you wrote, and I read the paper, and it was very helpful, and I thought you could help me.” He said, “Your husband? I don't remember your husband.” I said, “You mean you want me to believe that when he said he was in class with you he was really out with a blonde?”
	He got so embarrassed and of course he was being kosher. At that time, you weren't supposed to know anything about the analyst and here I am. I knew that he wrote this paper, and I had read it. He knew my husband, thought he was smart and kind, and all that.
MSK	It wasn't working but he was trying to be “anonymous” right?
AKR	Yes, exactly. Anyway, he agreed that I could work with him. There he said ‘Well, I know him, but I just couldn't tell you. But you never let go of it.’ We just thought it was very funny which it was; it was ridiculous, so I said some sort of affirming words, that I understood where he was coming from and it was just OK to see that he follows the party line. Except that it didn't work.
	Initially the analysis about the theme of “How come you don't want to move to the suburbs with your children because you care about your children so much and why are you letting them live in the city?” It's the same stuff that my parents were telling me. Go be a housewife in the suburbs. But he was implying that he was asking to understand why I didn't want that route. Though to Page 82 me it sounded very similar to, in fact it sounded exactly like what my parents wanted me to do and were pressuring me on. He and they both were telling the children were not well taken care of because they were living in the city where it was dirty and it was crowded, and it was dangerous and why was I doing this to them? And neither my parents, nor Arlow, could accept that I wanted and needed to continue my career for intellectual reasons and because that was how I had found peace with myself and peace in the world.
	I could do something good, and I needed to do something good, and I needed to work hard. This was important to me, so he didn't fully understand it either. It felt like he was not inviting us to a mutual curiosity where he was curious and I was curious.
	Had I gone to live in the suburbs I would have become as depressed as my mother was in the suburbs. I mean I saw that my mother, when she stopped working, she became such a depressed person. I told him I was not wanting to be like that, and I knew I already was a depressed person so why add that to make things even worse? Forget it.
MSK	I don't know how to say this properly, but you have a kind of very unique, rebellious streak right from the start. That's a very old side of you. That, I believe is what I am hearing as a theme of your life. Here you are disagreeing with Arlow right from the start.
AKR	Yes, that's a very old side and I needed it to survive. Because of coming from feeling like being an orphan. My mom was not around for the whole week; she would visit for a dinner once a week on Fridays. And “being like an orphan” was a strong anxiety of mine.
MSK	I'm also thinking about your primary femininity issue and this paper we're going to publish that is also a very old side of you. The way you perceive the world is not mainstream it's a person with deep curiosity, and creative kind of rebellious, something like that. Page 83
AKR	Yes absolutely and that curiosity and creativity was encouraged by the experience at the University of Chicago that I started at the young age of 16. A place where students were taken very seriously. What you thought mattered, you know. I knew other people would listen to what you were saying. All of the teaching there at that time, it's not true anymore, but all of the teaching there was through seminars.
MSK	I was amazed with what you told me about University of Chicago of those years. Sounds like the mythical Aristotelean Academia almost—where you learn to develop ideas with a small group of students and a highest quality scholar leading, facilitating and joining the discussions. It develops a deep sense of trust in your mind.
AKR	Yes, this was a really amazing thing. And, yes, economically it's not viable now, but it was wonderful when it happened. This was a great experience of support for me it was so important that the college years were tremendously important, and it had been terrible to think that my parents did not want me to continue there. I mean it was absolutely awful for me that they didn't support it, and they didn't value it, and they didn't think I should be doing it.
	You know, I've been thinking about how I got analytic training, as we talked about last time. I started by having an analysis, which I needed for personal reasons, not for training.
	At the time that I started my analysis, I was working as a psychologist and doing well with that and enjoying it. I was at Columbia, doing statistics and research design and running this project, and I loved doing it. So, I had no intention of becoming a psychoanalyst at that time.
	And then the money for research dried up, and my children graduated from elementary school, and I had no real reason to continue that job, the job was done and was done well. We made the pages of The New York Times with it, and we had a big influence on high schools all over the country. They did not have any interruptions. Page 84
MSK	Do you still have that NYT page?
AKR	Do I have it? No, but I could get it. And I was in analysis at the time, and I was talking about. I don't even remember what, in my analytic session, and suddenly my analyst said, you didn't read today's Times? which he had never said anything like that before, and then I discovered that our research was reported in The New York Times.
MSK	Well, that's something, The New York Times.
AKR	The New York Times, yes. And it had a tremendous impact. Many schools adapted the kind of the things that we recommended, and there were no high school disruptions, the way there were the college disruptions. Although most of the people who were to be drafted were the ones who graduated from high school and didn't go to college, because there was an exemption: If you were in college, you didn't have to serve in the army, yes. So, even though they were the ones most at risk, there was nothing in the way of demonstrations, when they used our model. I've had to negotiate with the students. So, we're very happy, very satisfied with that.
	But then came a new administration and I had to choose from different alternatives. One, I had an offer from a university in the Southwest for a tenure-track job. That was impossible, because my family and everything was in New York. And my husband wasn't going to move to some place in the Southwest that didn't even have an analytic institute.
	And the other choice was to go with the U.S. Office of Education and do a lot of traveling, and that was not a good thing either, to teach people how to do what we had done with our research, how to set up similar research designs. Well, I was not going to do that.
	So, I decided I had been very interested in working with kids with learning disabilities, which I did before this research job. At that time, I had discovered, or I thought I discovered, that most of these kids, while they did have some neurological issues, they also had many and debilitating emotional issues around not feeling Page 85 as good as others. Feeling disabled, feeling hopeless about themselves, feeling self-hatred. I was very interested in working on that and I opened a practice, and I was filled up pretty quickly.
	And then a colleague called and said. “You know, we're getting together a group to study with Martin Bergmann to study psychoanalytic theory.” I said, “oh, that's very interesting, I think I'll do that.” It would give me more connection to this field, and it will be more support, because I was working quite alone.
	So, I joined that group, and there were 8 guys and me. This was something I had experienced through graduate school as well, with doing the courses that the girls didn't want to do. And we decided that after all, after doing some reading and doing some discussing, that it would be wonderful to read Freud beginning to end, and the Standard Edition had just come out at that time.
MSK	24 volumes?
AKR	Well, the 24th volume had just come out, yes. We decided to hire George Gross, who was then at New York Psychoanalytic, and ask him if he would like to read through all of Freud with us, and he was delighted. He thought that was a great idea, and we did that. It took us three and a half years to do it, meeting once a week. And that was so interesting, and it seemed to me to illuminate much of what I was experiencing in my child psychotherapy practice, which is what it turned out to be.
	In time, the members of the group got more interested. We would add a second evening of the week, and we would hire everyone who taught at New York Psychoanalytic to give us the same course, except we'd pay for it. They were not paid for teaching, and they already had the course outline and all the readings and everything, and they didn't have that much more work to do, to do the same thing for us. And at this time, of course, they were paid. They would be doing something illegal, if they would supervise us, so they couldn't supervise us, but they could teach us the same courses they were teaching. Page 86
	I was working a lot with adolescents. Because that was the most difficult work and everyone didn't want to do it. And so, I got a lot of referrals for adolescents. And adolescent children of colleagues, actually, so they were very psychologically minded.
	I met a man named Donald Kaplan, who was at the time, organizing the New York Freudian Society. And I asked him to be my supervisor. He was a psychologist. I was referred an analytic case, and I started working with Kaplan. And all this was going on, and then, I needed a second supervisor, so I got a second case.
	Norbert Friedman, who was at IPTAR, was highly regarded as a supervisor, so I had him as a supervisor. So, I was in supervision twice a week, and I had two, five-time-a-week cases. I was launched on an analytic career through this circuitous way. And I loved doing it, and I was good, so my patients stayed and got better, and they were really very gratifying days.
	Two or three years later Donald Kaplan called me up one day and said, “Look, I'm running for president of the New York Freudian Society, and I need votes. Would you join the society and vote for me?” I felt very grateful to him for the good supervision I had gotten. I said, yes, I'd be glad to do that. A week later, Norbert Friedman called me up and said, “I hear you're joining the Freudian Society. Didn't you learn from me? Aren't you interested in IPTAR?” I joined IPTAR, too. So, I became very involved in psychoanalytic politics in a weird, weird way.
	Meanwhile, while studying with this group we read something in Freud in the Standard Edition, that said ‘Women don't have genital anxiety because they don't have a genital to lose’. And I said, “That's not right! I have a genital. Not like yours, but I have one. And it gives me pleasure. And I would be really worried if anyone tried to hurt it. Or hurt me by hurting it.”
	And this was how I started on a paper about female genital anxiety. And I was good friends with Charlie Brenner. We used to have lunch, a whole luncheon group he had every Friday. And I talked to him about it, and I said, you know, you wrote in your book, Page 87 your big book, a whole chapter about why women are depressed because they think they've already lost their genital. And I said, “I don't think so, not from the women in my practice. And not from my own experience. I think that women value genital experience, and that genital experience starts very early, in little girl babies. I observed this in young children I cared for. I have diapered them; I don't know how many times. And they always love it. They love to be washed there, they love the experience of their genital, and I don't think they think it's been cut off. They enjoy it.” And Charlie said, “Get the data and write the paper.”
MSK	Oh!?. That's interesting. It doesn't fit with the mythological image of Brenner who is a sharp critique of ideas that do not fit with his point of view.
AKR	Remarkably generous of him. He welcomed talking about what he did not know just as much about what he knew.
MSK	Oh, okay. That surprises me. Now, let me ask you a question. So, at this point in time, there's IPTAR, New York Freudian. But you're still outside of the mainstream of American Psychoanalytic? So, your institutes said, “Okay, we don't have to be a part of APSA, we can develop our institutes, if you like it or not, we're going to do it,” something like that.
AKR	Correct. These institutes were started originally by refugees from Europe who were analysts, and who were, for various reasons, unable to get along with the American establishment, and therefore, they got kicked out of New York Psychoanalytic, or what was then called Downstate, or what was then Columbia.
	They were not able to be subservient in the way they needed to be. They came in with the backing of their historical ties “Well, we know everything, we're Europeans, we were analyzed by Freud himself, etc. You know that Freud thought Americans were dumb and would be in psychoanalysis.
	And there were also, a limited number of patients, and people were afraid to lose their patients to these other guys. And therefore, Page 88 there was this animosity between them. So, the Europeans were willing to teach psychologists, because Freud said it's okay.
MSK	How does all of this make sense?
AKR	We're all member institutes of the American.
MSK	But they're mostly white male Americans.
AKR	Yes.
MSK	And is there also anti-Semitism in this?
AKR	No.
MSK	Oh, Okay, so it's not anti-Semitic. It is “first come first served. I was here before, so sorry, not in New York, you go west,” whatever, something like that. Territorial.
AKR	Yes. They were just coming out of the Depression. They had all these people who were drafted, coming back. And there was a whole fear that there would not be enough patients. Some of the Europeans came just before the war, which meant just after the Depression, when everyone was terrified, I'm not going to be able to make a living. And some of them came after the war. When there was this fear of all the GIs coming back.
MSK	The reason I'm asking is I know there is a period of anti-Semitism, early to mid-century, in academia.
AKR	Oh, yes. Very much, Arnie talks about this. Wasn't true in Psychoanalysis though. Very different. But let me go back to the idea of castration and discussion with Freud and Brenner. So, I gathered the data and wrote the paper. I was surprised as you were just now. I was so surprised when he was so encouraging, I was just as astounded as I could be. Oh, it took a lot of courage to say it to him in the first place, and then, to be encouraged. Oh my god!
MSK	Yes, that's true. Maybe he liked that. Page 89
AKR	Yes. Well, that's why I was thinking about it, because I was thinking about it going in with that paper.
	So, Psychoanalytic politics. I got involved really very, early on. There were encouraging responses from colleagues about becoming involved in the larger psychoanalytic world. In the IPA, if not in the American. And we started Division 39 of the American Psychological Association. Division 39 was the psychoanalytic group. I organized the Mexican meeting, which was, like, the third meeting of that group, where we went to a destination, and talked about psychoanalytic issues, and read papers, and did a miniature version of what the American did at its meetings. We were imitating what the American did.
	Because we thought it was a very good thing to have this cross-fertilization of different groups that would have their own ideas, and so there were some groups in LA, there were some groups in San Francisco, and of course, the New York groups. Then there was one in Florida, in Miami. All of these different groups of psychologists who had been trained by the European analysts. So wherever there were a large enough group of the European analysts, psychologists got trained.
	Many of us felt that the training of psychologists was very important and should go on everywhere that the American Psychoanalytic had groups, had institutes. Why couldn't psychologists get analytic training in Chicago, in Detroit, in Cincinnati, all these places that the American had institutes when there were psychologists interested in doing this and willing to, you know, go through the years of training?
	There was a group of people, not me, but a group of psychologists, started conversations with the American about doing this. With the idea that in these other places, there were not enough analysts. And there would be if they trained psychologists. There were four years of meetings. And then the American Psychological Association, the larger group, which was very big, I mean, it's 20,000 people at that time, it's more now, we invited the president Page 90 and some other members of the American Psychoanalytic to Washington to discuss this issue. And they came.
	A guy named Ed Joseph was the president of the American Psychoanalytic at the time. And he said, okay, you're inviting us, that means you'll pay, right? For the American Psychological, for that group, it was a small amount of money. It was ridiculous to argue about it, so they said, yes, we'll pay for your transportation and your hotel and your meals and everything, and we'll treat you to this meeting.
	So, he came to the meeting, and said, “We have to think about it some more, we have to talk about it.” Anyway, he deferred again. This was now the fifth year of such meetings. He deferred making any commitments. And he went back home to New York, and he sent the American Psychological Association his bill for his transportation for his hotel. And while he was at the hotel, he also brought his wife, so she had to be paid for as well. And… they brought a lot of personal laundry from home. They got the hotel to do their laundry. And he sent that bill with it!
MSK	That's… that's really cheap I must say.
AKR	After this, we were done. American Psychological Association said “Ed, here's your money, don't bother us ever again. We're not interested in talking to you ever again.”
MSK	This is a guy who's probably making enough money to have an apartment on the Fifth Avenue or something, right?
AKR	Yes! Yes! It was totally a slap in the face. It was, you know a ‘gotcha’ for everything. I'll get you, talk to you, and I'll show you who's the boss.
	The Mexican meeting of Division 39 was soon after this. I organized it and I was the program chair for that. We talked about joining the American Psychoanalytic, or the IPA, or whatever else we wanted to join. What should we do next? That was the central question. APA, our big organization said they want nothing more to do with these APSA guys. What do we do now? Page 91
	Then came the idea that we sue them. We sue the American, for restraint of trade. That they have no scientific or philosophical reason for not training psychologists. It's just not wanting the competition from psychologists. In fact, Freud quite forcefully stated that medical training is irrelevant to becoming a psychoanalyst, and they had what they called in those days lay analysts which was psychologists, social workers, teachers, like Anna Freud. I mean, Freud was saying this about his own daughter. She's just as good as any other analyst, he was saying.
MSK	This was more of an American issue, not true for Britain?
AKR	Not true for Britain, not true for any place else in the world, only in the U.S. The French trained psychologists, the Spanish trained psychologists, the Argentinians, everybody, except the U.S.
MSK	And it was not an IPA rule.
AKR	No, but the American had a special position in the IPA. It's now lost, but as long as the American met IPA standards, they were able to put in some standards of their own. In fact, they were stricter standards than the IPA. In other words, if in the IPA you could train anybody, in the U.S, you could only train psychiatrists who had been to medical school and done a psychiatry residency. So, this special agreement meant that psychologists from the U.S. could not join the IPA. Because in the U.S, only the American could set the standards. And the IPA agreed to this because, at the time, the IPA was very broke, and everyone in Europe was very, very poor. It was just after the Second World War. The Americans were supporting the IPA. The dues from the U.S. were perhaps 80% of their budget.
	And they the Americans said, we'll pull out. We don't have to be members of the IPA if you don't agree to this. So, the IPA agreed. All of this I had learned from Martin Bergmann and other people who were involved at that time in trying to become psychoanalysts when they were “only” psychologists. They were not MDs.
	So, we hired a lawyer who was a psychologist who was getting psychoanalytic training. Because the American had a rule that Page 92 you could train psychologists or other people if they promise never to practice. So, they were going to get training and never practice. Well, forget that, of course. Everybody who signed that knew that it was not going to happen. That, of course, they were going to go into practice. What else? I mean, why else would they want analytic training from the American?
MSK	Yes, there's a limit to human masochism, right?
AKR	Yes. The idea was they would do research. They were allowed to do research. Or they were a professor of French, they were allowed to teach French literature from a psychoanalytic point of view, or whatever. I mean, all these ideas. But they practiced, they liked the practice, and they went on to practice on their own, afterward. It was a fake thing. Really just a fake thing.
	And it was because institutes were not getting enough MDs to train, because MDs, in the US, at least had to pay very high fees for medical school, very high fees, and then had to work for very, very low salaries as interns and residents. So, everybody was in debt by the time they finished psychiatry residency and they really couldn't afford to do analytic training or analytic work.
	It took years to get the American to agree to negotiate, and then there was many years of negotiation that led to nothing. So, it was really a long process.
MSK	Yes, then came the laundry list, right?
AKR	The “laundry” did it. That was the turning point. And so, this lawyer said, “It's clearly an economic issue. What we have to sue about is not what Freud said, or what science there was. What we have to sue about is they are protecting high fees.”
	And one of the stupid things that Ed Joseph did was to say, “We can't let them in, they're going to have all these women psychologists, and they had very cheap training, and they're going to be able to work for low fee, and they're going to ruin it for everybody.” Page 93
MSK	You know, these guys who have autocratic tendencies occasionally say things that they should never have said. They get caught red handed.
AKR	Yes. They should never have said it. It was the truth. But they shouldn't have said it. And once they said it, it was the last nail on the coffin.
	Then we won the lawsuit. During this process, suddenly, all of Arnie's colleagues and friends at New York Psychoanalytic who used to invite us to dinner parties, they would come to our house for dinner, kids would play together, all kinds of things, social interactions stopped.
MSK	Oh.
AKR	Because he was married to me. You don't fraternize with the enemy.
MSK	Oh, he did even worse, you know, he married the enemy. That's when the idiotic comment was made where they suggested “You should divorce,” right?
AKR	Yes, or you are in trouble.
MSK	I mean, it is unbelievable. It's somewhat absurd and almost funny now, but at the time, it's not funny. At that moment, some people took it very seriously.
AKR	Yes! It was really so disappointing that they behave this way. I really thought they were friends. I got more involved in psychoanalytic politics than I wanted to be.
MSK	By the time this lawsuit was in full force, you were now full-time practicing. You were in psychoanalytic world, in it.
AKR	Yes, I was practicing psychoanalysis. And I was not charging low fees, which made them very angry. I had a sliding scale, I saw poor people for next to nothing, and I had some rich patients who really paid well. Page 94
MSK	So it's a great statement that you don't need to have a penis, neither an anatomical nor a medical, ‘MD penis’ to do this. You must have been a real pain for a lot of people.
AKR	Oh, yes. Absolutely. I remember one time, somewhat later on, after I had written this paper, Charlie Brenner invited me to a case conference that he ran at New York Psychoanalytic, to present a case. And I presented the case. It was a very interesting case of a young woman who had, at that time, lived in California. She was the daughter of a movie director. And she read this paper, and she said, “I need to have this person be my analyst.” And she came to New York. We talked a little, and she got an apartment, she got a job! And she became an analytic patient.
	So, one of the people in this seminar said. “But of course, you saw her at a low fee, right?” And I said, “well, actually no. Her family was willing to pay a fee commensurate with their economic status.” And he said, “Oh, so the father was this famous director. And that's why they had the money.” I said, “No, actually, the mother had the money. The father made a nice living, but the mother was the daughter of an English lord who had married this American guy, and she came with a nice estate.” And they really got so angry.
	You know, they were looking for all different ways to say that women don't have it, women are dependent, women are this and that. They would not focus on what the patient said and did, and what I said and did in the sessions. They kept drawing it into this political, economic thing. Which had nothing to do with what this patient was about.
MSK	Why that stereotype, you think? I mean, because you and I talked about your Polish background, the mill owner grand Tante, and her daughter, your very close dear Tante, all working women and a culture where working women was praised.
AKR	These analysts, many of whom were Jewish, but they were, second, third, fourth generation Americans, and they were so imbued in American culture. And they had nothing to do with this shtetl culture that my parents came from. Page 95
MSK	So, an essential aspect of Americanization is the image where the wife stays at home, takes Mama's little helper, and so forth.
AKR	Yes. And waits for the husband.
MSK	They're used to that. They don't know the Eastern European culture.
AKR	Exactly.
MSK	It's an acculturation that happened in this country.
AKR	Yes. And, and it was intentional. In building the country, you were not allowed to speak a foreign language. You know, the linguist joke about “trilingual, bilingual and American.” That was absolutely intentional. It has changed now. Spanish is the second language of the whole United States now.
MSK	Very interesting. Because if you look at Freud, it's a more along the lines of husband working, wife taking care of children, etc.
AKR	Yes, when they became more assimilated in the Austrian culture. It was also wife at home. Austrian culture was Catholic. Very different. Very different.
MSK	And a number of Eastern European, very prominent Jewish names that I know quite a bit about, like Karl Marx and Freud were Germanized. Well, the parents of Karl Marx had already converted, and the love of his life was a Christian German aristocrat, Jenny Von Westphalen. And then Freud was, at some points, ambivalent about his cultural identity, it seems.
AKR	Yes, absolutely.
MSK	There's something… They aren't like the Arnie you saw in Chicago. A practicing Orthodox, praying and following kosher, very much embedded in his traditional cultural identity.
AKR	Well, that Arnie I saw in Chicago, was closer to the culture that my parents who came from came from Europe. He also thought of women as working. He also you know, so for me, he was the right guy. In the modern world working woman is generally more Page 96 accepted now, despite the strong trends to revert that. But it wasn't the case in New York of my youth.
MSK	So that was one of your political struggles. Egalitarianism of men and women. In psychoanalysis and other fields, and so forth.
AKR	Yes. And that had a big influence on my analytic thinking as well. And that was why that young woman wanted to come all the way cross-country for her analysis.
MSK	Yes, that's something.
AKR	Yes. And why her family was willing to support that long analysis, and they didn't waver. They supported it the whole time. I mean, not just financially.
MSK	Well it seems we diverged in a wonderful way. But for the purposes of these conversations, let me take us back to your analytic career. I mean, one fascinating thing I'm hearing is you actually were not too invested in becoming an analyst, and that probably made your analysis with Arlow more, for lack of a better word, neutral, or free. Because you didn't want to impress him to be an analyst and so forth. It was just, for your personal needs, your own curiosity and when you felt like it, you didn't hesitate to give it to him. Pretty straightforward.
AKR	Yes, absolutely. I was not the easiest patient at all.
MSK	Because, you know, in training analyses, people get a little stiff. And allowing the unfolding of a tasty negative transference is not that easy. So, that may have served you in a very interesting way.
AKR	I think so. I think so. Let me tell you about my analyst's response to my papers, presentations on these issues.
	I think it's very interesting, at least it was interesting to me, that when I wrote the first paper, Challenging the idea. I sent a copy to my analyst, it was after my analysis, and I sent him a copy, saying 'What do you think of this? Would you please correct where I'm wrong or question where I'm questionable.” Page 97
	And he wrote me back. Single space typed on a typewriter, that's what he used in those days, 10 pages. In which he said, basically, “You can't say something this controversial, without a lot more evidence, get a lot more evidence. It's not for a journal; it's probably for a book.” In other words, he was saying, take more time, do more, do more, don't… let anyone see this. And I was surprised that he was, what seemed to me, quite timid.
MSK	Mm.
AKR	So, I sent it anyway. I sent it to the International Journal. It was the paper about female perversion. A telephone perversion in a woman. And that got accepted and there was not much controversy about it.
	I had given it orally at different places, including New York Psychoanalytic, and there was not that much controversy about it. It seemed that what I was calling a perversion, other people felt comfortable calling separation anxiety. Which was nice, and not sexy, and not demeaning, or anything like that.
	And the whole point of the paper, was that it was nasty, that she was imprisoning her mother in this way. And that she was using her pain as a way to manipulate and control other people and her world. And a good friend of mine got it. She got the idea, and she said, “You know? Masochist is the leader.” And she gave me a paper she had written previously, about how saying, “I'm in pain,” manipulates the other person.
	We were on the same wavelength. We were understanding female masochism in the same way. And this encouraged me a lot to then go on and write about female sexuality in a way that if not challenging, was at least different from what Freud was saying. And from what, particularly, the ego psychologists were saying. So, I was coming at it from the point of view of my own experience. And the experience of other women, who talked to me about their experience of their daughter's sexuality, of infantile sexuality in girls. Page 98
	And they all said, the same thing. Girls are easy to toilet train. They like it. Boys are much harder. That's because the urine as it comes out, excites the labia and the clitoris. It is pleasurable to the little girl. Little girls smile when you diaper them. And sometimes giggle, that this is fun. And I went back and read Freud. And Freud's idea was that the little girl is a little boy until she sees a boy with a penis. In other words, she's satisfied with her own sexual equipment. To begin with.
MSK	Freud has the theory that the little girl is a boy until she sees the boy?
AKR	Yes!
MSK	Oh, okay.
AKR	Yes. But why call that being a boy? Why not call that being a little girl who can experience pleasure? Because he was thinking only a boy can have pleasure. Only the penis gives pleasure. What did he know? He never had a clitoris. And being very intellectual and visual and developed, he wasn't thinking about the knowledge and the experience of the psychomotor body, of the whole body. He was thinking of the eye. He learned through the eye, he read, he saw. This was very important.
MSK	That's very interesting. Let me add to that, I'd never thought of that. He was a very prominent neuropathologist, do you know?
AKR	Yes, yes!
MSK	He did a lot of research on eels, so he used to draw them and so forth. He was very, very high class.
AKR	Yes. And those eels… Changed from boy to girl.
MSK	I didn't know that one.
AKR	Yes! That's what was so fascinating about eels.
MSK	That's really good. Page 99
AKR	Research was done on eels, because their sexuality could change, and did.
MSK	I missed that connection, okay. Maybe purposefully.
AKR	Maybe purposefully. It's a very exciting idea. So, his mental furniture was such that this was a logical idea. On the other hand, my mental furniture came from learning theory, and largely from Piaget who talked about the kind of learning that comes from doing. Muscle learning, sensory learning.
MSK	That's very interesting.
AKR	From the experience of the body, pre-verbal, and verbal. Piaget's ideas really covered learning from age 1 to 6 to the same period that Freudians think, we all think, is so important in development, and lays down the basis for further mental life, for the rest of the person's life. So, this kind of learning, that you shouldn't turn this, you shouldn't touch the stove because it's hot, learning that if you put your thumb in your mouth, it's comforting. This kind of learning is the infant's tool to live in the world.
	And this kind of learning includes which parts of the body can be painful. And which parts of the body can give pleasure. And we know that the greatest nerve concentration in the whole body is not the eye or the ear or the tongue, but the clitoris.
MSK	Hmm.
AKR	More nerve endings there than anywhere else. So, a little girl learns very quickly that that's pleasurable, and that that can be very painful. Both. That if you hurt the clitoris, it really hurts. And if you touch it gently, that's fun!
MSK	That's very interesting. So then, that maybe have some connection to the female circumcision.
AKR	Yes, exactly. That is where female sexuality is located, and if you want to destroy female sexuality, destroy that part of the body. Page 100
MSK	Hmm. I see. The other thing, though, is it's not too easy to visualize, unlike the boy's penis. Right?
AKR	No! If you look down and spread your legs, you can see the whole thing. And you spread your legs every time you pee. All you have to do is look down, you see it.
MSK	That's amazing. Little girls can recognize it early on, visually, too then.
AKR	All they have to do is look! But you quickly learned that you're not supposed to look. That you're not supposed to be interested. That people get very upset if you're interested.
MSK	Oh, that's very interesting because then the reverse is probably true for the boys. You better look and pee far away as much as you can. There are competitions around that.
AKR	Yes.
MSK	Oh, I see. So, shame is located into looking.
AKR	Very quickly. Don't look at that, pretend you don't know, pretend you don't see, pretend you don't feel. Every little girl is taught that.
MSK	I got you.
AKR	Yeah. So, a very important paper. about that is called Everybody Must Be Just Like Me, by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, influenced me a lot to think about that. In her paper, she talked about her daughter, she had two daughters, so she was one of these women who had daughters and could observe early female development. Well, she had taught her daughter to look at herself and see it. It was okay, and she should be proud of it, and it was a good thing, and she had a nice experience of it. And when her daughter saw her father in the shower…
	Oh, and the important thing I'm leaving out is that little girls are not taught the name of it. Little boys are taught it's a penis, but little girls are not taught that's a vulva. Page 101
	And you have a vulva. But during the 60's–70's feminism, little girls were being taught, that's your vulva. Her daughter saw her father in the shower, saw his penis and said, Mommy! Daddy has something hanging from his vulva. So, the culture, of the feminist culture of that time, which encouraged women to even use a mirror to look down.
MSK	Hmm.
AKR	It really showed that if you didn't make them ashamed of it, girls could be very happy with having their sexual organ as it was. And not see the penis as something better but see the penis as something strange and different from what I have.
MSK	Let me tell you a funny story. I know a little girl and she used to say, “boys have a tail.”
AKR	Yes! Yes
MSK	Tail. What a degrading image to male grandiosity!
AKR	Hangs down there like a tail. And it can lift up like a tail. She's absolutely right, it's a tail.
AKR	It had a real effect on me, and I think on many other women. And on psychoanalytic theory. I was just going one step further and providing the clinical material that went with that, with the idea that science is about building. We build on each other's work. We learn from each other, and we teach each other. And I thought Freud was perfectly right when he said, I don't understand women, it'll take women analysts to figure it out. Page 102

IJCD 3B(2):79-102 (2025)

Conversations with Arlene Kramer Richards

Author: M. Sagman Kayatekin MD

AKR	During my years in College, I slowly realized that I had problems and that I was doing some things that were good for me and some that were self-defeating, and I knew then that I needed treatment. I got into a psychotherapy with someone whom my parents friends recommended. I had a few sessions with him because I was going back to school.
	That was during the summer break of the first year in college, and he was really terrible. He was much dumber than I was, and he knew it, and I knew it, and that didn't work at all. For example, I came in wearing a white shirt that was tailored like a man's shirt, and he said to me, ‘you have penis envy.’ In the first session! As if he spoke to a five-year-old in a first interview and his evidence was that I was wearing this tailored white shirt.
MSK	That's quite a ‘deep’ interpretation. Was he a psychoanalyst?
AKR	He was rejected from New York Psychoanalytic. So, he was a psychotherapist of a kind, psychoanalyst of a maverick kind. He called himself a psychoanalyst, but he was someone who had not had full analytic training. I think he had gone to some courses. Whatever he was, he sure was someone who was very insecure about being dumb and yet I did get something out of it just talking to him. I learned some things about myself just from hearing myself talk, just as I am learning as I am talking to you.
MSK	Yes.
AKR	I think the method is so good that even someone who isn't good at it can do very good work sometimes. Anyways, I stuck with it till it was time to go back to school, and said, thank you very much, and left and did better from then on. Page 79
	Later on I got into analysis with Arlow. It was during my own analysis that I got interested in becoming a psychoanalyst. I had known for many years that I was so depressed, and I had to work very hard to fight against the depression. I had to work all the time; I did so many things and the time had come when my husband was finishing his analysis so it looked like we might have enough money for me to start.
	And the impetus finally came one day when I was crossing the street, and a big truck came to a screeching halt before hitting me. The truck driver leaned out of the window and said to me ‘what's the matter with you lady, you're trying to get killed and it'll be my fault?’
	So, he made a very serious interpretation, and I understood the seriousness of the situation. I was in graduate school at the time trying to work on my dissertation and I had very mixed emotions about finishing the dissertation and being able then to get a job in the academic world which I wanted. But I understood that if I got a job in the academic world it wasn't going to be in New York City. You don't start out that way, you start out at small college. But my husband was very involved in the New York Psychoanalytic and in his practice and he wasn't moving anywhere.
	Thus, it seemed like I had to choose between an academic life and my family, and I chose my family but that made me very sad about finishing my dissertation and having nowhere to go after that.
MSK	In some ways you're analytic journey kind of starts in an interesting way because most people that I know who are in analytic training, are also doing psychotherapy and psychiatry and so forth. You're doing something very different as work, so that gives an interesting perspective. I would think eventually it could have been enriching because you have a foot outside of the potentially constraining, almost monochromatic life of working in psychotherapy and becoming a psychoanalyst. Most of the times our professional lives just consist of those very related and to a degree, narrow fields. Page 80
AKR	Yes and luckily enough I did take a few courses that were useful. One in this psychology of Piaget, who was himself analyzed although he wasn't an analyst and whose interest in how children learn fit in with my interest. That had developed in college; about how we know anything, about the philosophy of science, about how do we find things out. There were other thinkers about child psychology in particular who were thinking about how children learn, and this is related to how scientists learn. The development of curiosity, the development of skepticism, the development of becoming part of a community of learners. Interaction with people who have the same kinds of questions in mind so it fit together very well, except that I felt I still wasn't meeting my parents' expectations that I should be a woman whose husband supports her.
	By now Arnie was a doctor, and he had gone through analytic training, I had completed my graduate studies and so I was very conflicted about continuing my career and how I wanted to do it. I knew Edith Jacobson and I called her and asked her if I could come in and see if I could become a patient and she said she was sorry but she didn't have any time. I was crushed. I couldn't think of another woman analyst who I knew. I wanted a woman analyst.
	As a context, at that time my son was 12 years old, and he was preparing for his bar mitzvah. This had been a very difficult time for me because I felt he was like moving into the world of being a man and not my little boy anymore. And all the years that Arnie had been working so hard and his schooling and everything, I had become very close with Stephen. I really cared about him a lot and the thought that it was better for him not to be that close with me was very sad for me. It was sad because it resonated with the story of my life. I didn't understand this at the time, but it resonated with having left my poor little brother behind when I went off to university and I left him behind with my parents who I knew were not fit parents. I felt very guilty about the big turn approaching—here Stephen was going off to be a man.
	Arnie told me that a Dr. Arlow who was at the New York Psychoanalytic had recently written a very good paper about bar Page 81 mitzvah in which he understood some of this and maybe that would be the right person for me to approach next.
	I read the paper. It made sense to me. It's a very nice paper and I went for an interview with Doctor Arlow, and I explained that I had wanted such help for a long time but couldn't afford to and was busy supporting my family. I was a schoolteacher and all that, and now I had enough money to have an analysis, and I certainly needed it because I understood this deep underlying depression was not good and was going to get me killed eventually if I kept up going on like this.
	He said, how did you come to me, and I said, “Well my husband was a student of yours and he told me about this paper you wrote, and I read the paper, and it was very helpful, and I thought you could help me.” He said, “Your husband? I don't remember your husband.” I said, “You mean you want me to believe that when he said he was in class with you he was really out with a blonde?”
	He got so embarrassed and of course he was being kosher. At that time, you weren't supposed to know anything about the analyst and here I am. I knew that he wrote this paper, and I had read it. He knew my husband, thought he was smart and kind, and all that.
MSK	It wasn't working but he was trying to be “anonymous” right?
AKR	Yes, exactly. Anyway, he agreed that I could work with him. There he said ‘Well, I know him, but I just couldn't tell you. But you never let go of it.’ We just thought it was very funny which it was; it was ridiculous, so I said some sort of affirming words, that I understood where he was coming from and it was just OK to see that he follows the party line. Except that it didn't work.
	Initially the analysis about the theme of “How come you don't want to move to the suburbs with your children because you care about your children so much and why are you letting them live in the city?” It's the same stuff that my parents were telling me. Go be a housewife in the suburbs. But he was implying that he was asking to understand why I didn't want that route. Though to Page 82 me it sounded very similar to, in fact it sounded exactly like what my parents wanted me to do and were pressuring me on. He and they both were telling the children were not well taken care of because they were living in the city where it was dirty and it was crowded, and it was dangerous and why was I doing this to them? And neither my parents, nor Arlow, could accept that I wanted and needed to continue my career for intellectual reasons and because that was how I had found peace with myself and peace in the world.
	I could do something good, and I needed to do something good, and I needed to work hard. This was important to me, so he didn't fully understand it either. It felt like he was not inviting us to a mutual curiosity where he was curious and I was curious.
	Had I gone to live in the suburbs I would have become as depressed as my mother was in the suburbs. I mean I saw that my mother, when she stopped working, she became such a depressed person. I told him I was not wanting to be like that, and I knew I already was a depressed person so why add that to make things even worse? Forget it.
MSK	I don't know how to say this properly, but you have a kind of very unique, rebellious streak right from the start. That's a very old side of you. That, I believe is what I am hearing as a theme of your life. Here you are disagreeing with Arlow right from the start.
AKR	Yes, that's a very old side and I needed it to survive. Because of coming from feeling like being an orphan. My mom was not around for the whole week; she would visit for a dinner once a week on Fridays. And “being like an orphan” was a strong anxiety of mine.
MSK	I'm also thinking about your primary femininity issue and this paper we're going to publish that is also a very old side of you. The way you perceive the world is not mainstream it's a person with deep curiosity, and creative kind of rebellious, something like that. Page 83
AKR	Yes absolutely and that curiosity and creativity was encouraged by the experience at the University of Chicago that I started at the young age of 16. A place where students were taken very seriously. What you thought mattered, you know. I knew other people would listen to what you were saying. All of the teaching there at that time, it's not true anymore, but all of the teaching there was through seminars.
MSK	I was amazed with what you told me about University of Chicago of those years. Sounds like the mythical Aristotelean Academia almost—where you learn to develop ideas with a small group of students and a highest quality scholar leading, facilitating and joining the discussions. It develops a deep sense of trust in your mind.
AKR	Yes, this was a really amazing thing. And, yes, economically it's not viable now, but it was wonderful when it happened. This was a great experience of support for me it was so important that the college years were tremendously important, and it had been terrible to think that my parents did not want me to continue there. I mean it was absolutely awful for me that they didn't support it, and they didn't value it, and they didn't think I should be doing it.
	You know, I've been thinking about how I got analytic training, as we talked about last time. I started by having an analysis, which I needed for personal reasons, not for training.
	At the time that I started my analysis, I was working as a psychologist and doing well with that and enjoying it. I was at Columbia, doing statistics and research design and running this project, and I loved doing it. So, I had no intention of becoming a psychoanalyst at that time.
	And then the money for research dried up, and my children graduated from elementary school, and I had no real reason to continue that job, the job was done and was done well. We made the pages of The New York Times with it, and we had a big influence on high schools all over the country. They did not have any interruptions. Page 84
MSK	Do you still have that NYT page?
AKR	Do I have it? No, but I could get it. And I was in analysis at the time, and I was talking about. I don't even remember what, in my analytic session, and suddenly my analyst said, you didn't read today's Times? which he had never said anything like that before, and then I discovered that our research was reported in The New York Times.
MSK	Well, that's something, The New York Times.
AKR	The New York Times, yes. And it had a tremendous impact. Many schools adapted the kind of the things that we recommended, and there were no high school disruptions, the way there were the college disruptions. Although most of the people who were to be drafted were the ones who graduated from high school and didn't go to college, because there was an exemption: If you were in college, you didn't have to serve in the army, yes. So, even though they were the ones most at risk, there was nothing in the way of demonstrations, when they used our model. I've had to negotiate with the students. So, we're very happy, very satisfied with that.
	But then came a new administration and I had to choose from different alternatives. One, I had an offer from a university in the Southwest for a tenure-track job. That was impossible, because my family and everything was in New York. And my husband wasn't going to move to some place in the Southwest that didn't even have an analytic institute.
	And the other choice was to go with the U.S. Office of Education and do a lot of traveling, and that was not a good thing either, to teach people how to do what we had done with our research, how to set up similar research designs. Well, I was not going to do that.
	So, I decided I had been very interested in working with kids with learning disabilities, which I did before this research job. At that time, I had discovered, or I thought I discovered, that most of these kids, while they did have some neurological issues, they also had many and debilitating emotional issues around not feeling Page 85 as good as others. Feeling disabled, feeling hopeless about themselves, feeling self-hatred. I was very interested in working on that and I opened a practice, and I was filled up pretty quickly.
	And then a colleague called and said. “You know, we're getting together a group to study with Martin Bergmann to study psychoanalytic theory.” I said, “oh, that's very interesting, I think I'll do that.” It would give me more connection to this field, and it will be more support, because I was working quite alone.
	So, I joined that group, and there were 8 guys and me. This was something I had experienced through graduate school as well, with doing the courses that the girls didn't want to do. And we decided that after all, after doing some reading and doing some discussing, that it would be wonderful to read Freud beginning to end, and the Standard Edition had just come out at that time.
MSK	24 volumes?
AKR	Well, the 24th volume had just come out, yes. We decided to hire George Gross, who was then at New York Psychoanalytic, and ask him if he would like to read through all of Freud with us, and he was delighted. He thought that was a great idea, and we did that. It took us three and a half years to do it, meeting once a week. And that was so interesting, and it seemed to me to illuminate much of what I was experiencing in my child psychotherapy practice, which is what it turned out to be.
	In time, the members of the group got more interested. We would add a second evening of the week, and we would hire everyone who taught at New York Psychoanalytic to give us the same course, except we'd pay for it. They were not paid for teaching, and they already had the course outline and all the readings and everything, and they didn't have that much more work to do, to do the same thing for us. And at this time, of course, they were paid. They would be doing something illegal, if they would supervise us, so they couldn't supervise us, but they could teach us the same courses they were teaching. Page 86
	I was working a lot with adolescents. Because that was the most difficult work and everyone didn't want to do it. And so, I got a lot of referrals for adolescents. And adolescent children of colleagues, actually, so they were very psychologically minded.
	I met a man named Donald Kaplan, who was at the time, organizing the New York Freudian Society. And I asked him to be my supervisor. He was a psychologist. I was referred an analytic case, and I started working with Kaplan. And all this was going on, and then, I needed a second supervisor, so I got a second case.
	Norbert Friedman, who was at IPTAR, was highly regarded as a supervisor, so I had him as a supervisor. So, I was in supervision twice a week, and I had two, five-time-a-week cases. I was launched on an analytic career through this circuitous way. And I loved doing it, and I was good, so my patients stayed and got better, and they were really very gratifying days.
	Two or three years later Donald Kaplan called me up one day and said, “Look, I'm running for president of the New York Freudian Society, and I need votes. Would you join the society and vote for me?” I felt very grateful to him for the good supervision I had gotten. I said, yes, I'd be glad to do that. A week later, Norbert Friedman called me up and said, “I hear you're joining the Freudian Society. Didn't you learn from me? Aren't you interested in IPTAR?” I joined IPTAR, too. So, I became very involved in psychoanalytic politics in a weird, weird way.
	Meanwhile, while studying with this group we read something in Freud in the Standard Edition, that said ‘Women don't have genital anxiety because they don't have a genital to lose’. And I said, “That's not right! I have a genital. Not like yours, but I have one. And it gives me pleasure. And I would be really worried if anyone tried to hurt it. Or hurt me by hurting it.”
	And this was how I started on a paper about female genital anxiety. And I was good friends with Charlie Brenner. We used to have lunch, a whole luncheon group he had every Friday. And I talked to him about it, and I said, you know, you wrote in your book, Page 87 your big book, a whole chapter about why women are depressed because they think they've already lost their genital. And I said, “I don't think so, not from the women in my practice. And not from my own experience. I think that women value genital experience, and that genital experience starts very early, in little girl babies. I observed this in young children I cared for. I have diapered them; I don't know how many times. And they always love it. They love to be washed there, they love the experience of their genital, and I don't think they think it's been cut off. They enjoy it.” And Charlie said, “Get the data and write the paper.”
MSK	Oh!?. That's interesting. It doesn't fit with the mythological image of Brenner who is a sharp critique of ideas that do not fit with his point of view.
AKR	Remarkably generous of him. He welcomed talking about what he did not know just as much about what he knew.
MSK	Oh, okay. That surprises me. Now, let me ask you a question. So, at this point in time, there's IPTAR, New York Freudian. But you're still outside of the mainstream of American Psychoanalytic? So, your institutes said, “Okay, we don't have to be a part of APSA, we can develop our institutes, if you like it or not, we're going to do it,” something like that.
AKR	Correct. These institutes were started originally by refugees from Europe who were analysts, and who were, for various reasons, unable to get along with the American establishment, and therefore, they got kicked out of New York Psychoanalytic, or what was then called Downstate, or what was then Columbia.
	They were not able to be subservient in the way they needed to be. They came in with the backing of their historical ties “Well, we know everything, we're Europeans, we were analyzed by Freud himself, etc. You know that Freud thought Americans were dumb and would be in psychoanalysis.
	And there were also, a limited number of patients, and people were afraid to lose their patients to these other guys. And therefore, Page 88 there was this animosity between them. So, the Europeans were willing to teach psychologists, because Freud said it's okay.
MSK	How does all of this make sense?
AKR	We're all member institutes of the American.
MSK	But they're mostly white male Americans.
AKR	Yes.
MSK	And is there also anti-Semitism in this?
AKR	No.
MSK	Oh, Okay, so it's not anti-Semitic. It is “first come first served. I was here before, so sorry, not in New York, you go west,” whatever, something like that. Territorial.
AKR	Yes. They were just coming out of the Depression. They had all these people who were drafted, coming back. And there was a whole fear that there would not be enough patients. Some of the Europeans came just before the war, which meant just after the Depression, when everyone was terrified, I'm not going to be able to make a living. And some of them came after the war. When there was this fear of all the GIs coming back.
MSK	The reason I'm asking is I know there is a period of anti-Semitism, early to mid-century, in academia.
AKR	Oh, yes. Very much, Arnie talks about this. Wasn't true in Psychoanalysis though. Very different. But let me go back to the idea of castration and discussion with Freud and Brenner. So, I gathered the data and wrote the paper. I was surprised as you were just now. I was so surprised when he was so encouraging, I was just as astounded as I could be. Oh, it took a lot of courage to say it to him in the first place, and then, to be encouraged. Oh my god!
MSK	Yes, that's true. Maybe he liked that. Page 89
AKR	Yes. Well, that's why I was thinking about it, because I was thinking about it going in with that paper.
	So, Psychoanalytic politics. I got involved really very, early on. There were encouraging responses from colleagues about becoming involved in the larger psychoanalytic world. In the IPA, if not in the American. And we started Division 39 of the American Psychological Association. Division 39 was the psychoanalytic group. I organized the Mexican meeting, which was, like, the third meeting of that group, where we went to a destination, and talked about psychoanalytic issues, and read papers, and did a miniature version of what the American did at its meetings. We were imitating what the American did.
	Because we thought it was a very good thing to have this cross-fertilization of different groups that would have their own ideas, and so there were some groups in LA, there were some groups in San Francisco, and of course, the New York groups. Then there was one in Florida, in Miami. All of these different groups of psychologists who had been trained by the European analysts. So wherever there were a large enough group of the European analysts, psychologists got trained.
	Many of us felt that the training of psychologists was very important and should go on everywhere that the American Psychoanalytic had groups, had institutes. Why couldn't psychologists get analytic training in Chicago, in Detroit, in Cincinnati, all these places that the American had institutes when there were psychologists interested in doing this and willing to, you know, go through the years of training?
	There was a group of people, not me, but a group of psychologists, started conversations with the American about doing this. With the idea that in these other places, there were not enough analysts. And there would be if they trained psychologists. There were four years of meetings. And then the American Psychological Association, the larger group, which was very big, I mean, it's 20,000 people at that time, it's more now, we invited the president Page 90 and some other members of the American Psychoanalytic to Washington to discuss this issue. And they came.
	A guy named Ed Joseph was the president of the American Psychoanalytic at the time. And he said, okay, you're inviting us, that means you'll pay, right? For the American Psychological, for that group, it was a small amount of money. It was ridiculous to argue about it, so they said, yes, we'll pay for your transportation and your hotel and your meals and everything, and we'll treat you to this meeting.
	So, he came to the meeting, and said, “We have to think about it some more, we have to talk about it.” Anyway, he deferred again. This was now the fifth year of such meetings. He deferred making any commitments. And he went back home to New York, and he sent the American Psychological Association his bill for his transportation for his hotel. And while he was at the hotel, he also brought his wife, so she had to be paid for as well. And… they brought a lot of personal laundry from home. They got the hotel to do their laundry. And he sent that bill with it!
MSK	That's… that's really cheap I must say.
AKR	After this, we were done. American Psychological Association said “Ed, here's your money, don't bother us ever again. We're not interested in talking to you ever again.”
MSK	This is a guy who's probably making enough money to have an apartment on the Fifth Avenue or something, right?
AKR	Yes! Yes! It was totally a slap in the face. It was, you know a ‘gotcha’ for everything. I'll get you, talk to you, and I'll show you who's the boss.
	The Mexican meeting of Division 39 was soon after this. I organized it and I was the program chair for that. We talked about joining the American Psychoanalytic, or the IPA, or whatever else we wanted to join. What should we do next? That was the central question. APA, our big organization said they want nothing more to do with these APSA guys. What do we do now? Page 91
	Then came the idea that we sue them. We sue the American, for restraint of trade. That they have no scientific or philosophical reason for not training psychologists. It's just not wanting the competition from psychologists. In fact, Freud quite forcefully stated that medical training is irrelevant to becoming a psychoanalyst, and they had what they called in those days lay analysts which was psychologists, social workers, teachers, like Anna Freud. I mean, Freud was saying this about his own daughter. She's just as good as any other analyst, he was saying.
MSK	This was more of an American issue, not true for Britain?
AKR	Not true for Britain, not true for any place else in the world, only in the U.S. The French trained psychologists, the Spanish trained psychologists, the Argentinians, everybody, except the U.S.
MSK	And it was not an IPA rule.
AKR	No, but the American had a special position in the IPA. It's now lost, but as long as the American met IPA standards, they were able to put in some standards of their own. In fact, they were stricter standards than the IPA. In other words, if in the IPA you could train anybody, in the U.S, you could only train psychiatrists who had been to medical school and done a psychiatry residency. So, this special agreement meant that psychologists from the U.S. could not join the IPA. Because in the U.S, only the American could set the standards. And the IPA agreed to this because, at the time, the IPA was very broke, and everyone in Europe was very, very poor. It was just after the Second World War. The Americans were supporting the IPA. The dues from the U.S. were perhaps 80% of their budget.
	And they the Americans said, we'll pull out. We don't have to be members of the IPA if you don't agree to this. So, the IPA agreed. All of this I had learned from Martin Bergmann and other people who were involved at that time in trying to become psychoanalysts when they were “only” psychologists. They were not MDs.
	So, we hired a lawyer who was a psychologist who was getting psychoanalytic training. Because the American had a rule that Page 92 you could train psychologists or other people if they promise never to practice. So, they were going to get training and never practice. Well, forget that, of course. Everybody who signed that knew that it was not going to happen. That, of course, they were going to go into practice. What else? I mean, why else would they want analytic training from the American?
MSK	Yes, there's a limit to human masochism, right?
AKR	Yes. The idea was they would do research. They were allowed to do research. Or they were a professor of French, they were allowed to teach French literature from a psychoanalytic point of view, or whatever. I mean, all these ideas. But they practiced, they liked the practice, and they went on to practice on their own, afterward. It was a fake thing. Really just a fake thing.
	And it was because institutes were not getting enough MDs to train, because MDs, in the US, at least had to pay very high fees for medical school, very high fees, and then had to work for very, very low salaries as interns and residents. So, everybody was in debt by the time they finished psychiatry residency and they really couldn't afford to do analytic training or analytic work.
	It took years to get the American to agree to negotiate, and then there was many years of negotiation that led to nothing. So, it was really a long process.
MSK	Yes, then came the laundry list, right?
AKR	The “laundry” did it. That was the turning point. And so, this lawyer said, “It's clearly an economic issue. What we have to sue about is not what Freud said, or what science there was. What we have to sue about is they are protecting high fees.”
	And one of the stupid things that Ed Joseph did was to say, “We can't let them in, they're going to have all these women psychologists, and they had very cheap training, and they're going to be able to work for low fee, and they're going to ruin it for everybody.” Page 93
MSK	You know, these guys who have autocratic tendencies occasionally say things that they should never have said. They get caught red handed.
AKR	Yes. They should never have said it. It was the truth. But they shouldn't have said it. And once they said it, it was the last nail on the coffin.
	Then we won the lawsuit. During this process, suddenly, all of Arnie's colleagues and friends at New York Psychoanalytic who used to invite us to dinner parties, they would come to our house for dinner, kids would play together, all kinds of things, social interactions stopped.
MSK	Oh.
AKR	Because he was married to me. You don't fraternize with the enemy.
MSK	Oh, he did even worse, you know, he married the enemy. That's when the idiotic comment was made where they suggested “You should divorce,” right?
AKR	Yes, or you are in trouble.
MSK	I mean, it is unbelievable. It's somewhat absurd and almost funny now, but at the time, it's not funny. At that moment, some people took it very seriously.
AKR	Yes! It was really so disappointing that they behave this way. I really thought they were friends. I got more involved in psychoanalytic politics than I wanted to be.
MSK	By the time this lawsuit was in full force, you were now full-time practicing. You were in psychoanalytic world, in it.
AKR	Yes, I was practicing psychoanalysis. And I was not charging low fees, which made them very angry. I had a sliding scale, I saw poor people for next to nothing, and I had some rich patients who really paid well. Page 94
MSK	So it's a great statement that you don't need to have a penis, neither an anatomical nor a medical, ‘MD penis’ to do this. You must have been a real pain for a lot of people.
AKR	Oh, yes. Absolutely. I remember one time, somewhat later on, after I had written this paper, Charlie Brenner invited me to a case conference that he ran at New York Psychoanalytic, to present a case. And I presented the case. It was a very interesting case of a young woman who had, at that time, lived in California. She was the daughter of a movie director. And she read this paper, and she said, “I need to have this person be my analyst.” And she came to New York. We talked a little, and she got an apartment, she got a job! And she became an analytic patient.
	So, one of the people in this seminar said. “But of course, you saw her at a low fee, right?” And I said, “well, actually no. Her family was willing to pay a fee commensurate with their economic status.” And he said, “Oh, so the father was this famous director. And that's why they had the money.” I said, “No, actually, the mother had the money. The father made a nice living, but the mother was the daughter of an English lord who had married this American guy, and she came with a nice estate.” And they really got so angry.
	You know, they were looking for all different ways to say that women don't have it, women are dependent, women are this and that. They would not focus on what the patient said and did, and what I said and did in the sessions. They kept drawing it into this political, economic thing. Which had nothing to do with what this patient was about.
MSK	Why that stereotype, you think? I mean, because you and I talked about your Polish background, the mill owner grand Tante, and her daughter, your very close dear Tante, all working women and a culture where working women was praised.
AKR	These analysts, many of whom were Jewish, but they were, second, third, fourth generation Americans, and they were so imbued in American culture. And they had nothing to do with this shtetl culture that my parents came from. Page 95
MSK	So, an essential aspect of Americanization is the image where the wife stays at home, takes Mama's little helper, and so forth.
AKR	Yes. And waits for the husband.
MSK	They're used to that. They don't know the Eastern European culture.
AKR	Exactly.
MSK	It's an acculturation that happened in this country.
AKR	Yes. And, and it was intentional. In building the country, you were not allowed to speak a foreign language. You know, the linguist joke about “trilingual, bilingual and American.” That was absolutely intentional. It has changed now. Spanish is the second language of the whole United States now.
MSK	Very interesting. Because if you look at Freud, it's a more along the lines of husband working, wife taking care of children, etc.
AKR	Yes, when they became more assimilated in the Austrian culture. It was also wife at home. Austrian culture was Catholic. Very different. Very different.
MSK	And a number of Eastern European, very prominent Jewish names that I know quite a bit about, like Karl Marx and Freud were Germanized. Well, the parents of Karl Marx had already converted, and the love of his life was a Christian German aristocrat, Jenny Von Westphalen. And then Freud was, at some points, ambivalent about his cultural identity, it seems.
AKR	Yes, absolutely.
MSK	There's something… They aren't like the Arnie you saw in Chicago. A practicing Orthodox, praying and following kosher, very much embedded in his traditional cultural identity.
AKR	Well, that Arnie I saw in Chicago, was closer to the culture that my parents who came from came from Europe. He also thought of women as working. He also you know, so for me, he was the right guy. In the modern world working woman is generally more Page 96 accepted now, despite the strong trends to revert that. But it wasn't the case in New York of my youth.
MSK	So that was one of your political struggles. Egalitarianism of men and women. In psychoanalysis and other fields, and so forth.
AKR	Yes. And that had a big influence on my analytic thinking as well. And that was why that young woman wanted to come all the way cross-country for her analysis.
MSK	Yes, that's something.
AKR	Yes. And why her family was willing to support that long analysis, and they didn't waver. They supported it the whole time. I mean, not just financially.
MSK	Well it seems we diverged in a wonderful way. But for the purposes of these conversations, let me take us back to your analytic career. I mean, one fascinating thing I'm hearing is you actually were not too invested in becoming an analyst, and that probably made your analysis with Arlow more, for lack of a better word, neutral, or free. Because you didn't want to impress him to be an analyst and so forth. It was just, for your personal needs, your own curiosity and when you felt like it, you didn't hesitate to give it to him. Pretty straightforward.
AKR	Yes, absolutely. I was not the easiest patient at all.
MSK	Because, you know, in training analyses, people get a little stiff. And allowing the unfolding of a tasty negative transference is not that easy. So, that may have served you in a very interesting way.
AKR	I think so. I think so. Let me tell you about my analyst's response to my papers, presentations on these issues.
	I think it's very interesting, at least it was interesting to me, that when I wrote the first paper, Challenging the idea. I sent a copy to my analyst, it was after my analysis, and I sent him a copy, saying 'What do you think of this? Would you please correct where I'm wrong or question where I'm questionable.” Page 97
	And he wrote me back. Single space typed on a typewriter, that's what he used in those days, 10 pages. In which he said, basically, “You can't say something this controversial, without a lot more evidence, get a lot more evidence. It's not for a journal; it's probably for a book.” In other words, he was saying, take more time, do more, do more, don't… let anyone see this. And I was surprised that he was, what seemed to me, quite timid.
MSK	Mm.
AKR	So, I sent it anyway. I sent it to the International Journal. It was the paper about female perversion. A telephone perversion in a woman. And that got accepted and there was not much controversy about it.
	I had given it orally at different places, including New York Psychoanalytic, and there was not that much controversy about it. It seemed that what I was calling a perversion, other people felt comfortable calling separation anxiety. Which was nice, and not sexy, and not demeaning, or anything like that.
	And the whole point of the paper, was that it was nasty, that she was imprisoning her mother in this way. And that she was using her pain as a way to manipulate and control other people and her world. And a good friend of mine got it. She got the idea, and she said, “You know? Masochist is the leader.” And she gave me a paper she had written previously, about how saying, “I'm in pain,” manipulates the other person.
	We were on the same wavelength. We were understanding female masochism in the same way. And this encouraged me a lot to then go on and write about female sexuality in a way that if not challenging, was at least different from what Freud was saying. And from what, particularly, the ego psychologists were saying. So, I was coming at it from the point of view of my own experience. And the experience of other women, who talked to me about their experience of their daughter's sexuality, of infantile sexuality in girls. Page 98
	And they all said, the same thing. Girls are easy to toilet train. They like it. Boys are much harder. That's because the urine as it comes out, excites the labia and the clitoris. It is pleasurable to the little girl. Little girls smile when you diaper them. And sometimes giggle, that this is fun. And I went back and read Freud. And Freud's idea was that the little girl is a little boy until she sees a boy with a penis. In other words, she's satisfied with her own sexual equipment. To begin with.
MSK	Freud has the theory that the little girl is a boy until she sees the boy?
AKR	Yes!
MSK	Oh, okay.
AKR	Yes. But why call that being a boy? Why not call that being a little girl who can experience pleasure? Because he was thinking only a boy can have pleasure. Only the penis gives pleasure. What did he know? He never had a clitoris. And being very intellectual and visual and developed, he wasn't thinking about the knowledge and the experience of the psychomotor body, of the whole body. He was thinking of the eye. He learned through the eye, he read, he saw. This was very important.
MSK	That's very interesting. Let me add to that, I'd never thought of that. He was a very prominent neuropathologist, do you know?
AKR	Yes, yes!
MSK	He did a lot of research on eels, so he used to draw them and so forth. He was very, very high class.
AKR	Yes. And those eels… Changed from boy to girl.
MSK	I didn't know that one.
AKR	Yes! That's what was so fascinating about eels.
MSK	That's really good. Page 99
AKR	Research was done on eels, because their sexuality could change, and did.
MSK	I missed that connection, okay. Maybe purposefully.
AKR	Maybe purposefully. It's a very exciting idea. So, his mental furniture was such that this was a logical idea. On the other hand, my mental furniture came from learning theory, and largely from Piaget who talked about the kind of learning that comes from doing. Muscle learning, sensory learning.
MSK	That's very interesting.
AKR	From the experience of the body, pre-verbal, and verbal. Piaget's ideas really covered learning from age 1 to 6 to the same period that Freudians think, we all think, is so important in development, and lays down the basis for further mental life, for the rest of the person's life. So, this kind of learning, that you shouldn't turn this, you shouldn't touch the stove because it's hot, learning that if you put your thumb in your mouth, it's comforting. This kind of learning is the infant's tool to live in the world.
	And this kind of learning includes which parts of the body can be painful. And which parts of the body can give pleasure. And we know that the greatest nerve concentration in the whole body is not the eye or the ear or the tongue, but the clitoris.
MSK	Hmm.
AKR	More nerve endings there than anywhere else. So, a little girl learns very quickly that that's pleasurable, and that that can be very painful. Both. That if you hurt the clitoris, it really hurts. And if you touch it gently, that's fun!
MSK	That's very interesting. So then, that maybe have some connection to the female circumcision.
AKR	Yes, exactly. That is where female sexuality is located, and if you want to destroy female sexuality, destroy that part of the body. Page 100
MSK	Hmm. I see. The other thing, though, is it's not too easy to visualize, unlike the boy's penis. Right?
AKR	No! If you look down and spread your legs, you can see the whole thing. And you spread your legs every time you pee. All you have to do is look down, you see it.
MSK	That's amazing. Little girls can recognize it early on, visually, too then.
AKR	All they have to do is look! But you quickly learned that you're not supposed to look. That you're not supposed to be interested. That people get very upset if you're interested.
MSK	Oh, that's very interesting because then the reverse is probably true for the boys. You better look and pee far away as much as you can. There are competitions around that.
AKR	Yes.
MSK	Oh, I see. So, shame is located into looking.
AKR	Very quickly. Don't look at that, pretend you don't know, pretend you don't see, pretend you don't feel. Every little girl is taught that.
MSK	I got you.
AKR	Yeah. So, a very important paper. about that is called Everybody Must Be Just Like Me, by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, influenced me a lot to think about that. In her paper, she talked about her daughter, she had two daughters, so she was one of these women who had daughters and could observe early female development. Well, she had taught her daughter to look at herself and see it. It was okay, and she should be proud of it, and it was a good thing, and she had a nice experience of it. And when her daughter saw her father in the shower…
	Oh, and the important thing I'm leaving out is that little girls are not taught the name of it. Little boys are taught it's a penis, but little girls are not taught that's a vulva. Page 101
	And you have a vulva. But during the 60's–70's feminism, little girls were being taught, that's your vulva. Her daughter saw her father in the shower, saw his penis and said, Mommy! Daddy has something hanging from his vulva. So, the culture, of the feminist culture of that time, which encouraged women to even use a mirror to look down.
MSK	Hmm.
AKR	It really showed that if you didn't make them ashamed of it, girls could be very happy with having their sexual organ as it was. And not see the penis as something better but see the penis as something strange and different from what I have.
MSK	Let me tell you a funny story. I know a little girl and she used to say, “boys have a tail.”
AKR	Yes! Yes
MSK	Tail. What a degrading image to male grandiosity!
AKR	Hangs down there like a tail. And it can lift up like a tail. She's absolutely right, it's a tail.
AKR	It had a real effect on me, and I think on many other women. And on psychoanalytic theory. I was just going one step further and providing the clinical material that went with that, with the idea that science is about building. We build on each other's work. We learn from each other, and we teach each other. And I thought Freud was perfectly right when he said, I don't understand women, it'll take women analysts to figure it out. Page 102