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Ralph Greenson died in 1979, twelve years after the appearance of his classic text The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 1. His editors have recently published a disappointing Vol. 2, as well as these twenty-six public lectures given between 1955 and 1978. It is testimony to Greenson's standing in circles wider than the psychoanalytic that interest in the full range of his output is sustained.
The writing is demonstrably that of a man who loved, hated, lived well, and enjoyed a high profile in public affairs. It was his lifelong commitment to allow psychoanalytic thought a voice in informing a society moving through traumas ranging beyond the personal, to civil unrest, Vietnam, feminism and Watergate.
The lectures are inevitably dated and repetitive, coming back time and time again to themes of sexuality, envy, boredom and death. Greenson finds in society a damaged capacity for emotional involvement. He shows that to love and to hate is healthy and fulfilling, that its achievement is frightening and painful. As love and hate are also felt to be uncontainable, they are resisted by a variety of defences, and appear in the individual, the family, and the nation in disguised and dangerous forms. ‘A death wish a day keeps the analyst away’, he writes, adding that it must be conscious and without guilt. There is no mention of paranoid schizoid or depressive positions, but they are well described in everyday situations, offering a potential container to any listener who feels the pricking of a symptom.
Greenson is particularly tough on the apathy and empty values of affluent America, with its regular props of tranquillizers, illicit drugs, sex and alcohol. He brings home the hidden functions of racism and nationalism, and details the splitting mechanisms in chronic boredom and in violence. ‘Why men like war’ was written in 1963 in the wake of Cuba and well before the full flood of Vietnam. It cannot have added to his popularity. Literature and film alike fall com