(The following report is designed to bring to the readers of the Newsletter an account of the career and work of a psychoanalyst who has made an outstanding contribution as a psychoanalytic researcher. It is our intention to publish reports on other researchers in future issues.)
Charles Fisher is a renowned psychoanalyst whose research has enriched our own science, and has provided inspiration and impetus to further psychoanalytic research. On interview, Dr. Fisher is intense, avid, curious, and totally absorbed in his elucidation of past and present research. There is a contagious communication of problems and fascinated search for understanding. Past President of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, and a training analyst, Dr. Fisher is a gifted teacher, a perennial student, and a pioneering scientist.
It might well be expected that there were earlier signs of curiosity and inquiry, of original investigation and contribution even before his outstanding psychoanalytic career. This hypothesis is amply confirmed.
Charles Fisher started Northwestern University School of Medicine in 1931, the pit of the depression. In preparation he had majored in psychology as a University of Chicago undergraduate, and had completed one year of graduate work in psychology. His early and cherished goal was to become a psychoanalyst. For lack of funds he soon dropped out of medical school, but then obtained a fellowship in neurophysiology. With Ranson, he explored the function of the hypothalamus and its relation to the pituitary. This work was fundamental, resulting in their discovery of the definitive pathophysiology of diabetes insipidus, and the function of the hypothalamico-hypophyseal system. This research also involved the first successful localization of the sexual drive centers in the hypothalamus, the same areas of interest to which Fisher returned some 25 years later in his studies of dreaming sleep. Fisher received his Ph.D. in Neurophysiology in 1934, with Magoun as classmate and coworker.
Continuing his important research with simultaneous medical studies, Fisher received his M.D. from Northwestern in 1939. He began psychoanalytic training at the then Washington-Baltimore Institute in 1940, and was soon drawn to new research. Collaborating with Farber, he investigated the experimental induction of dreams through hypnosis. He had always been fascinated by the effects of various stimulations or input into the “head”, and the nature of the output or response in both psychological and physiological terms. His research interests have moved from hypnosis and fugues to dreams and dream-like states, and most recently, to that dual organismic state called sleep, feeling that Freud and psychoanalysis had not yet plumbed all its mysteries.
Fisher worked for a year at Chestnut Lodge, and was then drafted in 1942. He served 3½ years on Ellis Island in the Public Health Service, and resumed psychoanalytic activity at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. During this period he wrote on the treatment of war neurosis with hypnosis, and on the fugue as a waking dream. He graduated from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1948, a “wunderkind” without much in the way of formal courses, though now sometimes regretful of this “gap” in his psychoanalytic education.
He entered full time practice in 1946, and was soon studying the effects of suggestion on his own patients (which he doesn't recommend), and writing on the psychoanalytic situation and hypnosis. He joined the staff of the Department of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Hospital, and in 1953 began doing research there. In 1954 he secured financial support from the Foundations' Fund for Research in Psychiatry (FFRP), and since then has worked “half time” in his laboratory at the Hospital. He was funded by the FFRP until 1960, and since then has had grant support from the NIMH. Fisher holds the rank of Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in the Mount Sinai School of Medicine; many of his most exciting findings were first presented in the informal setting of a hospital staff conference.
(The sweep and depth of Fisher's work are far out of proportion to the physical setting in which he works: a smallish suite of rooms in the hospital's basement. Two small rooms are furnished with cots, and are equipped for recording of physiologic variables. Here the subjects sleep and can be observed through a window while recordings are made. The sleep researcher cannot function without associates and technicians who will work through the night.)
By “chance” he was shown a copy of the Poetzl paper of 1917 reporting experiments with the tachistoscope. Fisher realized that Poetzl's work had never been replicated, although Freud had noted its
wealth of implications, and he soon acquired a tachistoscope. His laboratory researches have continued apace since that time. His fertile studies of dreams, images and perception led to reformulations of the construction of dreams and the development of perception. Perception outside of conscious awareness was subject to primary process transformations, and was likely to appear, with transference import, in manifest dreams with relative exclusion of conscious percepts. Perception could no longer be equated with consciousness and the concept of a progressive or regressive course of the dream impulse was no longer necessary.
In 1955 Fisher read Dement's Ph.D. thesis, which described the REM cycle, and recognized the tremendous implications of the new objective method of studying dreaming sleep and the revolutionary significance of the new findings. The upshot was that Dement then came to Mount Sinai in 1958 to work with Fisher on dream-sleep research. This collaboration resulted in the now classical “dream deprivation” studies, with the observation of compensatory rebound for missed REM sleep. Such deprivation and rebound of REM sleep has been implicated in the toxic psychoses of drug withdrawal syndromes, and in other mental disorders.
Aserinsky, who had discovered REM sleep, noted a prior German report of a sleep erection cycle which he suggested would be synchronous with REM periods. Fisher demonstrated this REM-erection cycle in man, and studied its vicissitudes in relation to such variables as age, anxiety, sexual activity, and dream deprivation.
Fisher recently turned his attention from the universal and obligatory REM to the dramatic and symptomatic nightmare. While the REM dream deals with controlled anxiety, the non-REM sleep night terror is a cataclysmic symptom characterized by uncontrolled anxiety and resembles an acute, reversible paranoid psychosis. While his studies of nightmares continue, Fisher remains ever alert to related problems and challenges. For example, can the dream be viewed without controversy as the guardian of sleep, or as having a discharge function as a psychic safety valve? What are the psychological and physiological functions of dreaming sleep? To what extent can analytic theory be correlated with modern neurophysiology?
The work is technically methodical and at times monotonous, but exciting questions of this sort both stimulate and reward the research. The endless quest for new insights leads Fisher on in his creative work as psychoanalyst and investigator.