Beginning in 1983, Dr. de Vries conducted a series of interviews with Dr. Lampl de Groot. Dr. Lampl, a former student, analysand and colleague of Freud's, is, at 91, still an active Training and Supervising Analyst at the Dutch Psychoanalytic Institute. She made many original contributions to psychoanalysis, particularly on the subject of female sexual development.
As a Dutch research graduate of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, I am frequently asked if I know Dr. Lampl de Groot; after all, the Netherlands is such a small country that everybody must surely know everybody else. Intrigued by the idea of getting acquainted with my famous compatriot, I arranged to call on her during a trip back to Amsterdam in 1983, returning for subsequent visits in 1984 and 1985.
Dr. Lampl lives in a row house on a quiet street in the fashionable southern section of Amsterdam. She answers my ring herself by pushing a button behind a glass door which, in typical Dutch fashion, allows a visitor to enter a hallway while protecting the hostess from the cold air. There is no separate office entrance from the street, an arrangement which conveys an immediate sense of the oneness of her personal and professional life.
At her invitation, I hang my coat next to hers on a coat rack and follow her to her first-floor office, located in what is normally the living room in most Dutch houses. A sound-proof door, however, indicates that it is not an ordinary living room. Once inside, there is again this sense of work and personal life intermingled, a feeling created by the way the room is furnished. On one side of the room, there is a couch with a chair behind it; on the other, a desk with neatly piled, familiar psychoanalytic journals. In between these two rather businesslike settings, however, there is a cozy seating arrangement of two comfortable chairs and a small table on a Persian rug. This setting of warmth, simplicity, homeliness and natural elegance is typical of the surroundings of the European psychoanalyst of the early 1900's.
Dr. Lampl settles herself in her chair, while inviting me to sit opposite her. She covers herself with a blanket, and looks expectantly at me, waiting for me to explain why I am here.
Dr. Lampl is neatly coiffed, conventionally dressed and trim, her carriage perfectly straight despite her advanced years. My initial impression, having been assigned 45 minutes when I asked to speak with her, is that I had better get quickly to the point. For although she seems flattered by my interest in her and her history, she also gives me the distinct impression that unless I stay very task-oriented, she will grow irritable at the waste of her time.
During this and my subsequent visits, my feelings for Dr. Lampl vacillated between awe and admiration and a slight annoyance about her outspokenness. I concluded that if you come to her to be cared for, you are at the wrong address, but that if you want a problem resolved, you are at the right place. And if, like me, you have come to ask her some questions, they should be good ones, for Dr. Lampl has a quick, sharp mind, and when she considers something nonsense—which she often does—she will tell you so in a very straightforward fashion. I also found that when a question is too personal, she will give you a short, evasive answer, and that when she likes the question you ask her, she will give you a warm smile and a lively description of how things were.
The way things were when Dr. Lampl was born were encouraging to the development of a strong and self-assured personality. Her family belonged to a small group of nineteenth-century Dutchmen with an academic tradition and a sense of responsibility toward people less well off than themselves, especially those in difficulty.
Dr. Lampl is the third of four daughters, the oldest of whom also became a physician. The youngest, to whom she had been very close, died at age three when Dr. Lampl was six years old. Her mother, coming from a musical family, encouraged her interest in music and art. Her father, who had money and who was broadminded, supported the then advanced wishes of his daughters.
Dr. Lampl started her medical studies in the small university town of Leiden, but switched to the University of Amsterdam in order to participate in the active cultural life of the capital of the Netherlands. In 1914, during her medical studies, Dr. Lampl heard a lecture by Professor G. Jelgersma on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. She had already read his dream book two years earlier, and after this lecture, she became even more intrigued by Freud and his work.
Freud's work was extremely controversial at the beginning of this century
and the pervasive discussions of sexuality in his writings were not considered “nice” literature for young women. Thus, when Dr. Lampl graduated with a medical degree in 1921, and announced that she would go to Vienna to be analyzed by Freud and to learn about psychoanalysis, most of her friends were not as supportive as her father and considered this a highly questionable undertaking.
Dr. Lampl wrote to Freud, who replied she would have to wait six months before he would have time to see her. In April, 1922, after six months of travel through Italy, looking at art—one of her lifelong passions—she settled in Vienna and started her analysis with Freud. Dr. Lampl remained in Vienna from 1922 to 1925, leading a life that would be the envy of any psychoanalytic candidate today. She worked at the Ambulatorium, doing low fee (or no fee) analytic work. Three nights a week, she took courses with such well-known psychoanalysts as Helene Deutsch, Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Reik, Siegfried Bernfeld and Paul Federn. She attended the scientific meetings of the Vienna Society under the brilliant chairmanship of Freud. Her analytic sessions were a mixture of hard work on her emotional conflicts and problems, which Freud treated very seriously, and fun, chatting with a man whom she admired greatly. “A personal friendship,” she notes, “grew out of our professional relationship.”
Eager to hear more about her personal analysis, I ask Dr. Lampl if she had seen Freud five times a week. “Six times and for 55 minutes,” the answer bounces back. When I ask her why Freud's analyses were so much shorter than today's, she answers that the notion that his analyses were short is a myth. There were many people, she tells me, whom he had in analysis for six and seven years. “In my case, I was through in about three years, although I went back later for a second bout, but that went rapidly.” Speculating on the myth of Freud's shorter analyses, Dr. Lampl notes that “many Americans came to Vienna for one year, the maximum period they could free themselves from medical responsibilities at home.” They had only one year of analysis, she says, “because their time was up” and not necessarily because they had finished their analysis.
But in 1925, Dr. Lampl had finished her analysis and went to Berlin to continue her psychoanalytic training. Freud, who had supported her move, advised her during their farewell visit to start writing about her own ideas in order to continue what he had started. In Berlin, she met Dr. Hans Lampl; they married and had two children. “I did not stop doing analysis,” she says, “but when I had the children, I limited and organized my work in such a way that I could spend most of their day with them. You know how important that is to children.”
Due to the political situation, the family moved to Vienna in 1933, rejoining Freud and the group of psychoanalysts around him. Freud frequently invited them to come and speak about their work. From 1934 on, Dr. Lampl was a member of the group meeting with Freud on a weekly basis. She also met with him individually, from time to time. “We spoke, of course, about analytic problems,” she says,—“we each had one partner of a troubled marriage in analysis.” “But,” she adds, “the political situation was also an important part of our conversation.”
Our topic of discussion returned to Freud and analysis. “Did Freud conduct analysis differently from how it is done today?,” I ask. “I can't answer that question because analysis is conducted in so many different ways,” she replies. But as she continues to speak, a definite picture emerges. “Certain practices and approaches that Freud discovered as useful and important have been made, at least by some analysts, into absolute and rigid rules and dogmas, sometimes even rituals, from which no deviation whatsoever can be tolerated.” She sighs. “Take neutrality. While neutrality has a role to play, it is an unnecessary barrier if you overdo it. The patients suffer from a too rigid approach if you are only a mirror. They suffer already enougn—otherwise they would not have come to see you. Often such a rigid neutrality slows patients down considerably, and you make them suffer unnecessarily.” She pauses and then continues, a disapproving expression on her face, “The same is true of the exaggerated notions about countertransference. Of course, you must keep your own problems from intruding into the analysis, but that does not mean that all the natural feelings one has when one works with another human being are automatically countertransference. The couch is also misused. If a patient is too frightened to use the couch, you can still do analysis by having the patient sit up. Freud was certainly not rigid in the use of the practices he invented.”
Her voice softens. “If you know what you are doing, analysis is not so difficult,” she says. “I know what I am doing because Freud taught me how to do it. Freud was a simple, straightforward person, and that is the way he wanted the work to be done.”
Addressing herself now to the nature of the analyst, she notes, “Of course, analysis is difficult for the patient. The reliving of those painful childhood memories is not easy, but the talented and experienced practitioner knows what to do to help the patient with those experiences. What is important,” she stresses, “is a natural talent—the same as for a composer or a painter. I don't see patients anymore,” she says —adding, almost parenthetically—“you can't burden your patients with your death. But I do a great deal of supervising and it is clear almost immediately whether or not someone has a natural talent to do analysis. If they do, those talents need to be developed and sharpened by practical experience. But if they don't … once in a while, I succeed in teaching them something, but there are many poor analysts.”
Although Dr. Lampl is concerned about a too rigid approach in psychoanalysis, she also complains that “the theory has been made unnecessarily complicated and often deviates from the fundamental concepts of psychoanalytic thinking.” I ask her to elaborate on her thoughts about modern development in analytic writing, admitting to her my own struggle with certain fundamental concepts and my occasional inclination to challenge them. Her eyes twinkle as she says, referring to my candidate status, “I can put those writings aside, but you can't.” Looking serious again, she continues. “Kohut, for example. He substitutes the psychology of the self for the instinctual drives. There is nothing new in that.” She shakes her head and exclaims, “Angst! Angst! Angst! Jung and Adler did exactly the same thing in the beginning.”
As for object relations theory, Dr. Lampl feels that the instinctual and biological givens are often denied. In challenging this theory, she also notes that the differentiation between self and object only gradually develops during the first years of life.
Dr. Lampl disagrees, too, with the current use of the term “narcissism”, noting that this term was used by Freud to indicate the position of the libido in the newborn baby, based on the biological tie with the mother. “One of the major factors in this confusion and clouding of the theory,” says Dr. Lampl, “is the denial of the biological basis.”
Another issue of concern for Dr. Lampl is short-term psychotherapy. “It is possible to help somebody with a pressing problem in the here and now, but the basic problems remain untouched,” she says. “The fundamental principles of psychoanalysis cannot be done justice in this approach,” she complains, “but
they will be blamed for the poor treatment outcome.”
Our conversation switches to Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. Dr. Lampl has great respect for Melanie Klein's work with children and for her empathic sense, but the two women held very different ideas about psychoanalytic theory. “We were not close friends,” she says, contrasting that relationship with her relationship to Anna Freud. Looking quite sad, Dr. Lampl continues. “Anna and I took the same courses and we became close friends for the rest of our lives.” The frequent visits back and forth between England and the Netherlands came to an end with Anna's illness and subsequent death in 1983.
In my first visit to Dr. Lampl, I had sensed a frailness in her which was less apparent in my next two visits. In retrospect, I see this frailness as her reaction to Anna Freud's death a few months earlier, a death which left her with great feelings of loneliness as the last survivor of Freud's era and with a sharpened awareness of her own advanced age. Talking later about that loss, she tells me, “I feel very sad. We were the four old ladies—Marianne Kris, Dorothy Burlingham, Anna and I; and now I am the only one still alive.”
She speaks frankly about her own fears of a painful end to her life, saying that she does not want to go through the same long suffering that Anna Freud endured. She believes in a right to choose one's time of death, but, she adds, realistically, “the closer you get to having to make that choice, the harder it might be.”
On our last visit, we both have a sense of “the end”, and not just because our time is up. Listening to her openly referring to her own death, I feel saddened because, with her death, Freud's era will finally come to a close. And yet, in spite of this intimation of mortality, I am not left with a sense of depletion. On the contrary, I depart with a sense of inner excitement. Part of that excitement is related to having spent time with someone who had been so closely connected to Freud and who brought alive for me the experiences of becoming a psychoanalyst under his guidance.
The excitement also has to do with the fact that this 91-year-old woman, who played such an important role in the development of the psychoanalytic movement, is still interested in encouraging younger colleagues to think and write about psychoanalytic ideas. Indeed, during one of our discussions—we were talking about female development and modern feminism—she urged me to write about the question of whether feminism did not often hide inner conflicts about one's own female identity. “Please start to write about it,” she said, “and send it to me. I will read it and comment on it.” Many years ago, Freud had said the same to her.