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I: Hessel Willemsen, Interviewer
L: Ladson Hinton
I: Ladson, welcome to this interview for the Journal of Analytical Psychology. I think amongst your many contributions you have done a great deal for the Journal and so the Journal is interested to hear more about you and your long career in psychoanalysis and philosophy; I hope we get to talk about these today. Welcome to the interview, first of all. If you don't mind, I'm asking if we could begin, perhaps, with you talking about [the philosopher] Husserl and why, so early in your life, you think he became so important and why you spent some time studying him.
L: I ran into Husserl's work at an interesting transition period in my life, when I was preparing to go to medical school, but was ambivalent whether to stay on in philosophy and literature, my core interest for a long time. My mentor was Fritz Friedmann, who was a friend of Erich Fromm, who was very much into, we called it then, philosophical anthropology. Robert Redfield, a ‘father’ of philosophical anthropology, was a prime mentor for Friedmann, and their correspondence has been published. He was an inspiring teacher, but always emphasized caring as the core of one's work, and that perspective opened the way for me to continue my plan to go to medical school. At that time, I was not finished with philosophy, and had not really decided whether to become a professor of philosophy or something like that. Completing a Master's with a year of concentration on philosophy helped me in that transition.
I saw that philosophy did not have to be only a matter of pundits in a university, but that everyday life was what mattered. During this, my extra year of study, Husserl was just becoming known to the English-speaking world. Phenomenology was still kind of a new enterprise in US academia, and it was a new and refreshing point of view to me. I chose Husserl's view of the transcendent for my thesis topic. I was intrigued to know what Husserl had meant by transcendent,