Mark Gehrre interviewed John E. Gedo on the occasion of the reissue of his 1983 book, Portraits of the Artist, in a paperback edition published by The Analytic Press in 1989. Dr. Gedo is the author of numerous scientific articles and several books, the most recent being Conceptual Issues in Psychoanalysis: Essays in History and Method (1986) and The Mind in Disorder: Psychoanalytic Models of Pathology (1988), both published by The Analytic Press. In this interview, the Newsletter was particularly interested in Dr. Gedo's views about the future of the discipline and the outlook for young psychoanalysts and prospective analysts.
MG: I'd like to start with a few general questions, Dr. Gedo. What do you see as necessary to the development of a psychoanalytic way of thinking? What fundamental values must be held by a person interested in a career in psychoanalysis?
JG: I think that many avenues can lead to a career in psychoanalysis and to whatever a person's ultimate professional identity will be within the field. I myself did not know when I started that I would end up as I have. I was as surprised as anyone by the outcome.
I came into psychoanalysis as a consequence of a family tradition that took for granted that I would become a physician. It was in the Central European tradition of high intellectual aspirations. I was supposed to be simultaneously an Arthur Koestler and a Semmelweiss.
“From the beginning, I realized that to build a fully analytic practice, I would have to take chances.”
I was fortunate that a multistage emigration and the resultant switching from school system to school system eventuated in my finishing college when I was only 18. After a year in the service, I began medical school. All I knew was that I wanted to be a doctor, but I was utterly uninterested in the Semmelweiss part. Almost simultaneously I was explosed to psychoanalytic materials, and very early I decided on psychiatry. This was in the 1940s, of course, when psychiatry and psychoanalysis overlapped and there was a hope that psychoanalytic psychiatry would be an important discipline. I had a bent toward biology, too, despite being barely able to get myself to read the material. Up to the time I graduated, I fantasied that before I started a psychiatry residency I would take training in general medicine. I had that kind of approach to psychoanalysis.
MG: You felt that there was not necessarily a split between biological and medical training, on one side, and a psychoanalytic interest on the other. They naturally went together.
JG: Yes. I chose the title of that first collection I edited with Pollock, Freud: The Fusion of Science and Humanism, because, self-evidently, that combination was my ideal. It still is, but I've had to face the fact that my abilities are not in the biological-scientific area.
MG: Would you say that young people these days have the same opportunities as you had to pursue the kind of training that you went through?
JG: Absolutely not. It was difficult in this country even in my time. My ideal represents the Freudian tradition very exactly. It still exists in Central Europe. But there is no American intelligentsia And insofar as it ever existed, it was a very narrow circle of New York, Jewish, Marxist academics. I am not saying that in Central Europe these circles were much larger, but they did exist more widely and within them everybody knew everybody else. This is an issue to which I address myself in the upcoming tenth anniversary edition of Pychoanalytic Inquiry.
MG: Whatever there is of an American intelligentsia today exists in universities. Yet psychoanalysis has never been offered as a field of study within an American university. Do you feel the universities can play a role in a psychoanalytic career at this point?
JG: Only a few elite institutions, perhaps those few that might, selfconsciously, feel that they have a right to remain elite. But psychoanalysis can survive only if the members of the psychoanalytic community feel themselves to be in the vanguard group of the highest social and intellectual caliber.
Unfortunately, what Freud was so afraid would happen to psychoanalysis if it were transferred to America has occurred. People were shocked that he thought such a move would mark the death of psychoanalysis, but he turned out to be an accurate prophet. Not only are we seeing the deintellectualization of psychoanalysis, but virtually the deprofessionalization of the discipline.
MG: What about alternative, nonmedical avenues to becoming a psychoanalyst?
JG: I don't think that the other mental health professions are more promising than psychiatry in this regard. Training in psychology or social work is equally nonintellectual. I am, of course, more supportive of the recruitment of serious intellectuals. But let 100 flowers bloom!
“… there is no American intelligentsia.”
MG: Certainly it was a significant decision on your part to limit your practice at such an early point. What do you see as consequences for young analysts who are very likely unable to see mostly psychoanalytic patients so early in their careers?
JG: Disastrous, if their ambitions are analytic. Before one can be confident that one can trust oneself, that one isn't going to have terrible countertransference and counteridentification difficlties, that one's technique is adequate—one has to have terminated a dozen or so cases. I managed to do that by the time I was 40.
At that point I started to pay close attention to how my cases were going. If I did everything according to the books and the results were not what the books had promised, I knew it wasn't my fault—I was doing exactly the same thing in the cases where it worked. Instead of feeling guilty and inadequate because I hadn't done the impossible, I started to ask, What's wrong with the theory?
Let me say this too: If at the age of 321 had applied the narrowest criteria of analyzability, I would never have taken the patients either. From the beginning, I realized that to build a fully analytic practice, I would have to take chances.
MG: Would you say, then, that your early decision to expand the criteria of analyzability led you to some of the feelings that you have about standardized technique?
JG: Yes, but I wouldn't say that I felt I was expanding the criteria for analyzability. I came from that era of psychiatric training when the treatment of hospitalized patients through “psychoanalysis” was at its height. The Chestnut Lodge model, a la Harry Stack Sullivan and Otto Will, was very much part of my background. Our training spoke with two voices: we had narrow criteria of analyzability, yet we could psychoanalyze schizophrenics. And I was trying to reconcile that paradox.
MG: Some of the your views on the limitations of technique, then, came from the attempt to deal with sicker people?
JG: Well, I had a hospital-based practice to start with, while I was a candidate. I didn't give it up because I wanted to—time constraints squeezed me out of it.
MG: Here both you and your more senior European colleague, Heinz Kohut, were looking at ways of going beyond the limits of psychoanalytic treatment as they were understood. Perhaps that commonality formed some of the basis of your original collaboration with him..
JG: It was not a collaboration. He befriended me; he gave me a sense that he really respected my abilities; and he opened all sorts of doors for me. About two years after I graduated, when I presented the case about which I differed with Fleming, he thoroughly endorsed my view of it. That's when he singled me out and began to defend me. He got me commissions to write for the journal in Germany; things that he didn't have time to do, he passed on to me. Then he said, “I have to do something for you because they are mistreating you at the Institute.” He introduced me to Anna Freud; he arranged for me to go to Hampstead for a visit. He asked me to serve as his secretary on the Committee on Scientific Activities. He was one of the people who recommended me to CAPS.
“I think we will be able to refine our techniques on the basis of our understanding of brain organization.”
JG: Yes. Not tomorrow, but someday. I think we will be able to refine our techniques on the basis of our understanding of brain organization. For instance, even now, we can say that making an interpretation by whistling a tune is more likely to be effective than making a statement, because we know that the song and the statement are processed in different sides of the brain. Because of what we know about how the brain processes different kinds of information, we know that music is a tool with a great potential for arousing emotion. We know that a message put into a metaphor will produce a greater effect than the same message communicated in a statement. We could reach the same conclusion purely on the basis of empirical psychoanalytic evidence, but we don't dare because we have no statistical proof. But when we understand the brain mechanism involved, we are much more ready to accept it.
MG: I would tend to look at metaphor as having a wonderful effect on the patient's ability to achieve a sense of emotional connectedness with the analyst irrespective of its biological mplications.
JG: Of course, the emotional connectedness. That's what produces drastic biological changes.
MG: A final word, Dr. Gedo?
JG: I might say something about temperament. Many different temperaments can make valuable contributions within psychoanalysis. As temperaments go, I am an eccentric in this profession. Nothing makes me happier than to read and write in solitude. And if that kind of solitude is not suited to your temperament then the kind of scholarly work I have done will be infinitely painful.
MG: Thank you, Dr. Gedo.
MG: Would you recommend intellectual preparation for an aspiring psychoanalyst?
JG: I think the person who came to psychoanalysis from such an unusual position would face many social difficulties. But, then, intellectually productive psychoanalysts have always had social difficulties and will continue to have them. And those who want to follow a career path such as mine have to be prepared for a great deal of unpleasantness from their colleagues.
My career path was determined by two factors: one, my naivete—I did what came to me naturally without regard for the social consequences; two, at the particular time when I did these things, I was anathema to the existing power structure, and I was blackballed. Very early I realized that I had nothing practical to lose—I'd lost everything. The only way to go was, Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
MG: So what would you say to inspire young intellectuals who have ambitions to be analysts—aside from the fact that they will have a difficult time? How will they negotiate the future?
JG: The hope is that, if they manage to get into print, and are literate, and have substantive ideas that they can present clearly, they will be flooded with referrals from all over the country. It's like opening a cornucopia.
MG: How have your own background and experiences affected your thinking about current psychoanalytic theories?
JG: My experiences as a psychoanalytic clinician, even when I did my supervised cases, demonstrated that nothing in the books was relevant to many of the problems of patients.
MG: Two of your supervisors, Bernard Kamm and Theresa Benedek, were raised in the European tradition.
JG: That's right. We had much in common, and they were training me to continue in my own tradition. My third supervisor and I, however, had an irreconcilable quarrel, and my fourth supervisor—Fleming—tried my make me fit into her mold. Finally, I ended up being blackballed because of a paper I presented to the Society after I graduated—the first ever presented by a recent graduate—in which I totally disagreed with the view she had espoused in the book. I was so naive that it never occurred to me that everyone didn't behave in that way. Until this contretemps with Fleming in 1964 or 1965, everything had worked out the way I thought it was bound to work out. All my experiences until then had met my naive preconceptions.
I had gotten my certificate in 1961, when I was 33. Only a year before that I had stopped taking psychotherapy patients.
MG: You were also one of the group of younger people involved with him in the publication of his first book.
JG: Along with Charles Kligerman and Marianne Kris, I was one of the group to whom he presented his work much earlier than that. Later I helped him to organize the group that included Goldberg, Basch, Wolf, the Ornsteins, and the Tolpins. Still later, I quit his circle for reasons that I thought involved only a clash of personalities; I was unaware that there were major disagreements between us. Heinz soon made those disagreements clear when he articulated his argument with me in the first chapter of The Restoration of the Self.
MG: What were those divergences between you?
JG: The initial difference in perspective surrounded the hierarchical view, which he did not accept although he had read my Models of the Mind and said that he thought it was right on the mark. Somehow he seemed convinced while reading it but later reconsidered.
MG: Is there some fundamental reason why the hierarchical model of the mind cannot be integrated with Kohut's subsequent views?
JG: You're putting that backwards. Kohut's original view can be integrated into the hierarchical model His subsequent views cannot. And I have continued to credit Kohut's early views as essential clinical contributions. Later, he tried to make one phase-specific mode of operation of the mind—the mode of organization characteristic of the syndrome he described—into a general psychology. This is not to say that in 1989 even a self psychologist would be satisfied with the way he described it 20 years ago.
MG: How do you think psychoanalysis will evolve as an intellectual enterprise? Will it incorporate more of what is available from other fields than it has in the last 10 or 15 years, or will it stay very insular?
JG: I hope that it will go in the direction of making valid correlations with allied disciplines—neurobiology, infant observation, cognitive psychology.
MG: How can training in those fields be combined with becoming a psychoanalyst?
JG: I don't think we need to be trained in those fields. I'm not trained in them.
MG: Do you find yourself limited in your ability to grasp material from those areas.
JG: It's not that hard. For what we need to know, all we need is a good dictionary to make sure that we don't conceptualize in a way that is precluded by the findings of the other disciplines.
MG: You seem committed to the idea that psychoanalysis has good reason to be involved with understanding of the brain. Do you feel that these areas of investigation ought to come together?
JG: Absolutely. Just as Freud thought when he wrote the Project. I think that Frank Sulloway is perfectly correct that Freud was a biologist of the mind. Not that I think hermeneutics is unimportant or that the study of language is unimportant or that the study of anthropology is unimportant
MG: Do you believe, then, that subjective experience will be able to be understood in objective terms and applied by the field one day? That somehow we will be able to locate, in a very concrete fashion, the places and spaces and substances that account for experience?