The Editor's invitation that I contribute a newsletter article relating to the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center's history, identity, procedures, or other topic of interest to the larger psychoanalytic community is generous. But such a kind proposal may tempt the unwitting writer to succumb to the siren calls of either the Scylla of triviality that comes of too narrow a focus on procedural issues peculiarly problematic to one's own institute or the Charybdis of grandiosity that accrues to the belief that one's own psychoanalytic family is more original or interesting than any other. Alert but perhaps not immune, to these perils, let me propose that what is most interesting about the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center is that it is university based rather than freestanding, the first such institute in this country, founded in 1945 by Sandor Rado, David Levy, Abram Kardiner, and George Daniels. Our intimate, 45-year long relationship with the Department of Psychiatry, the Medical Center, and Columbia University has had an inevitable and profound influence on our intellectual and institutional lives.
“… Rado, Levy, Kardiner, and Daniels were dedicating themselves to the battle against the belief that psychoanalysis was a completed science, something to be handed down as Holy Writ.”
Edith Kurzweil, in her recent book The Freudians: A Comparative Perspective (Yale University Press, 1989), makes the important point that “even the best psychoanalysts, those who manage to cure their patients, inevitably function within the native philosophical assumptions, intellectual controversies, and fashions of their culture. And these ultimately affect not only the professional activities of the analysts but their larger intellectual concerns, such as human freedom, democracy, or war and peace” (p.1). I would extend this claim by saying that these differences are manifest even within the particular local culture of individual institutes.
Each institute has philosophical underpinnings and modes of thinking that differentiate it from the others and that are intrinsic to its history and identity. While we as psychoanalysts are attuned to the influence of our patients' unconscious thinking, we may sometimes be less attuned to the preconscious collective assumptions or ideology that members of a close-knit group often share—particularly if we are part of that group.
The members of an institute have intricate connections and bonds with each other, and each of us is profoundly influenced by our institute's founders, theoreticians, and revered clinicians—some of whom we may not have known—and our idealizations of them. Idiosyncrasies of predilection, tone, emphasis, and sensibility are passed from generation to generation by way of transference to analyst and institute.
“The world of psychoanalysis as an intellectual discipline can—and must—encompass theoretical differences.”
The distinctive “culture” of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (founded as a “clinic” and only later raised to “center” status) is delimited by two separate but interrelated circumstances of its creation, each of them intimately connected with the character and aspirations of its founders. First the Institute was established as a direct protest against what its founders perceived as intolerable authoritarianism in psychoanalysis. Second, it was established within a university with the hope that the university would serve as a guarantor
of free inquiry and also provide the opportunity for scientific collaboration between psychoanalysts and academics from contiguous disciplines. For the Center, even now, when it is in the full flush of maturity, the enduring influences of the philosophical premises on which it was founded are evident in its commitment to the principle of academic freedom and scientific rigor and to its focus on interdisciplinary studies and research as well as on psychoanalytic training.
In founding the Columbia Clinic, Rado, Levy, Kardiner, and Daniels were dedicating themselves to the battle against the belief that psychoanalysis was a completed science, something to be handed down as Holy Writ. They had conceived this passionate mission—and for them it was a mission—because each had felt constrained by the limits of what was then considered mainstream psychoanalysis. David Levy, writing on the occasion of the Institute's tenth anniversary in 1955, portrayed Columbia's struggle to wrest free of the authoritarianism of the psychoanalytic movement:
“Our story begins with a protest against authoritarianism in science, a protest against the pollution of the atmosphere of free inquiry with the smog of doctrine, of dogmatism, of personal vituperation. It was an atmosphere in which students soon learned to ask the ‘right’ questions, which meant the questions that betrayed no evidence of ‘resistance’ to psychoanalytic doctrine. The ‘wrong’ question would too often elicit a blast from the instructor that the student had not been properly psychoanalyzed, that he was still evincing hostility and rivalry toward the father, that his approach to the problem was still adolescent etc. In this manner the classroom was a replica of the discussion that took place in the meetings of psychoanalytic societies.”
Despite the Clinic's dedication to academic freedom, the early years at Columbia were hardly free of dogmatism. Like revolutionaries everywhere, the founders of the Columbia Clinic had a defensive zeal that sometimes brooked no differences of opinion. There are some ironic aspects to Rado's defection from the New York Psychoanalytic. He was its first Educational Director, having been recruited to establish the Berlin Institute tripartite system of education in New York, and in some ways he significantly helped to shape the very institute from which he subsequently fled. What with the opposition of the American Psychoanalytic Association to sanctioning a second training institute in New York (it was against their by-laws!), the prestige of the already existing New York Psychoanalytic, and the sometimes intimidating (but always towering) intelligence of Rado at Columbia, it is in some ways amazing that this second institute ever took hold and was finally able to do so within the auspices of the American Psychoanalytic. (Contemporaneously, other analysts had broken away to form institutes independent of the American Psychoanalytic.)
Given the founders' intimate knowledge of the political problems that may ensue when society and institute are joined, they made sure that our institute and society remained separate. Within a few years, the institute, with the prestige of the university behind it, was firmly established, successful in ridding itself of its own brand of dogmatism and able to provide its students with a forum for sometimes fiery intellectual debate. Lionel Ovesey, one of the earliest graduates of the Institute and now a Professor Emeritus at Columbia, described his student days as heady, revolutionary, and electric and said that the candidates of his era felt that they were in the thick of the fray in what they called the “Battle of the Frames of Reference.”
“They believed that psychoanalysis would ultimately achieve its full scientific potential only in ongoing dialogue with other disciplines in the social sciences, neurology, psychiatry, and psychology.”
Fortunately, there has subsequently been a good deal of liberalization and scientific growth in our field, as well as some resolution of the battle of the frames of reference. Kardiner's prediction that mainstream analysts would move away from strict adherence to libido theory and incorporate the early critiques of psychoanalytic theory, many of them penned by Columbia faculty, proved to be true. There is now substantial agreement, without coercion, on many basic tenets of psychoanalysis.
But skirmishes among the different institutes do still occur, and nothing could be more natural and inevitable given the different circumstances in which each was conceived and founded. These institutional differences are not only inevitable, they are healthy—indispensable really, they are useful in unearthing each other's unacknowledged assumptions or unwarranted conclusions and in promoting interinstitute enrichment The world of psychoanalysis as an intellectual discipline can—and must—encompass theoretical differences. At Columbia we are proud that most theoretical points of view are represented and integrated into our curriculum. Just as most evolutionists would consider being known as “Darwinians” too narrow a designation now that their field is legitimatized and significantly changed since Darwin's time, most of us at Columbia regard ourselves as psychoanalysts, rather than Freudians or doctrinarians of any kind, while still regarding Freud as the creator of the discipline.
Columbia's iconoclastic identity has served it well but in recent years has become less relevant since the entire field of psychoanalysis has become more unified in its acceptance of certain general tenets and less doctrinaire in its insistence on specific applications or those principles. I am always struck, however, by the extremely high caliber of the critical intelligence of so many Columbia-trained analysts; I think it related to our longstanding skepticism of overarching theories.
Other aspects of our intellectual heritage remain as pertinent as ever, particularly our commitment to interdisciplinary study and research and our belief in the need for the verification of theory. Part of the reason for founding an institute within a university setting was to promote a scientific spirit of inquiry. This dream of putting psychoanalysis on a “scientific” basis was not original with the founders of Columbia In fact, it was Freud himself who, at the start of his clinical investigations, hoped that the observations of mental life would eventually be understood in terms of the brain sciences. The founders of Columbia continued in Freud's original hope long after most theorists, along with Freud himself, had turned their attention to primarily metapsychological concerns. They believed that psychoanalysis would ultimately achieve its full scientific potential only in ongoing dialogue with other disciplines in the social sciences, neurology, psychiatry, and psychology. With the new breakthroughs in the neurosciences and in cognitive psychology, this interdisciplinary
approach again appears increasingly more important.
Though the Columbia Center has never fully realized Ratio's dream of achieving a psychoanalytic curriculum made up of courses in the psychodynamics of growth and development comparative analysis of cultures, experimental analysis of animal behavior, psychophysiobiology, and neurophysiology and neuropathology, we have remained committed to interdisciplinary studies—for example, in our focus on the developmental perspective—and continue our efforts in that direction. The easy accessibility of the Department of Psychiatry and of the resources of the University as a whole have resulted in important collaborative work and teaching and have led us to take a comparatively broad view of the application of psychoanalytic theory.
Not only have we benefited from input from other disciplines, but, from its beginning, the Center has seen its charge as extending beyond the teaching of psychoanalysis into bringing the psychoanalytic point of view to other disciplines and utilizing psychoanalytic knowledge and methods to help illuminate major social issues. Our analysts have cultivated a continuing presence in the university, teaching in the college, the law school, the school of social work, and the divinity school, as well as participating in medical school and residency training, not only at Columbia but at its affiliate hospitals as well. Many of us have participated in interdisciplinary symposia on homosexuality, literature, and other topics, along with such scholars as Lionel Trilling, Steven Marcus, Quentin Anderson, Robert Belknap, Richard Kuhns, and a host of others.
“But most of us believe that we can no longer ignore the necessity for testing hypotheses generated within psychoanalysis.”
Believing psychoanalytic ideas to be relevant to society at large, we have organized several different series of interdisciplinary symposia, many later published as books: one on affects; one on disturbances at the juncture of psyche and soma; another on topics of general social relevance. This latter series was designed to help make psychoanalytic ideas familiar and relevant to other academics and the general public. For example, the conference “Truth and its Limits: Public and Private Domains” brought together psychoanalyst physicians, and philosophers to discuss issues of truth-telling versus truth-dumping, the development of conscience, the erosion in public confidence of the statements of its authority figures, and lying in medicine, public life, and personal relationships. In addition, we have collaborated with our society, the Association of Psychoanalytic Medicine, in still other series.
This willingness to address ourselves to the larger issues of our time goes back to our very beginnings: I was surprised and delighted, reading in our archives, to discover that at the second meeting of our society, held June 23, 1942, Dr. Levy had arranged for the group to hear an allied propaganda broadcast and he then delivered a short paper on war propaganda.
The commitment to an innovative, often interdisciplinary, approach has proved fruitful for research work done at the Columbia Institute. Rado, Kardiner, Levy, and Daniels were pioneers in the studies, respectively, of affects as motivators of behavior, the influence of culture on personality, early development, and psychosomatic medicine. Some of the recent and current research at the Columbia Center has addressed such topics as the impact of preoedipal issues on subsequent personality development the construction of gender, the intersection between culture and psyche, and the study of conscious fantasies.
Research has focused, as well, on comparative outcome studies in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, issues involved in the treatment of older patients and of interracial or transcultural treatment dyads, consideration of the interaction of biologic and psychodynamic factors in anxiety and anorexia nervosa, and a host of others. These researchers are among the beneficial byproducts of our finding ourselves in the midst of a great university and philosophically committed to availing ourselves of its resources. But we have yet to realize the full potential of such crossfertilization.
We are painfully aware that our research aspirations have not yet been fully achieved, in large part because of major ongoing methodological problems. Psychoanalysis is, as Freud told us long ago, a treatment modality, a theory of mind, and a methodology for research. As such, it may be regarded as complete unto itself, and some few at Columbia subscribe to this position. But most of us believe that we can no longer ignore the necessity for testing hypotheses generated within psychoanalysis. While acknowledging that we cannot adhere to any psychoanalytic hypothesis that is clearly contradicted by scientific evidence from the other life sciences, a persistent problem still remains in developing strategies for testing psychoanalytic propositions of any degree of complexity.
“Some may believe that our interdisciplinary focus and emphasis on research dilutes the pure gold of analysis with base metal but we take the position that we preserve the gold and the alloy is itself invaluable.”
We at Columbia, because of our situation within a department of psychiatry, are perhaps more acutely aware of this problem than some but have been no more successful in solving it. Our most serious failure (and I refer now to the whole field, not just Columbia) has been an inability to devise methods to systematically evaluate the outcome and efficacy of psychoanalytic therapy and our general reluctance to do so. Though Columbia's John Weber, and now John Oldham, have made important strides in that direction, much remains to be done, and we hope to be in the forefront of this crucial research.
Some may believe that our interdisciplinary focus and emphasis on research dilutes the pure gold of analysis with base metal, but we take the position that we preserve the gold and the alloy is itself invaluable. We believe that being a psychoanalyst enables one to conduct psychoanalytic therapy: but just as important it is a way of thinking that informs all other professional activities. We are very proud of our graduates who become full-time psychoanalysts, but equally proud of those who go on to become academicians and researchers and those who apply psychoanalysis to a variety of other professional pursuits. Our emphasis on diversity and on an interdisciplinarian approach is surely reinforced by our ties to the university, a bond we hope to continue and strengthen. We feel privileged to be psychoanalysts with the opportunity to engage as scholars and researchers in a university as distinguished as Columbia.