The better part of a decade has passed since Len Shengold and I cotaught a seminar on termination at the NYU Institute. I had known Shengold, mostly from afar, and his writings (somewhat better) for a number of years and was anticipating our teaching collaboration with considerable enthusiasm. I arrived for the first class full of ideas about bibliographies and relevant references. Then Shengold began by pulling out of his briefcase two volumes—one, the collected poems of Matthew Arnold; the other, the collected poems of W.H. Auden. And so we began, in what was, I would learn, typical Shengoldian fashion, with the Poet's vision of separation, loss, and the end.
Poetic justice of sorts was repeated when I paid him a visit on Superbowl Sunday this year. I quipped upon entering his consulting room that we would both be likely to end up on some FBI list for un-American activities by virtue of our scheduling an interview opposite The Event. (I thought it unlikely that he could quote football as well as Shakespeare.) Taking me completely by surprise, Shengold agreed that we might well raise suspicions, but as for our own interest in The Game, San Francisco was already so far ahead that the outcome was clearly decided; therefore, we might as well use the time for other business.
The breadth and depth of Shengold's interests are impressive. A sample includes literature, especially poetry, literary criticism, art, opera, theater, cuisine, and, as I also discovered, an earlier, avowed dedication to the once-Brooklyn Dodgers. Having published numerous articles in the major psychoanalytic journals for decades, Shengold recently produced two collections of essays, Halo in the Sky and the acclaimed volume, just out, Soul Murder, which has been very favorably reviewed in such places as the New York Times.
This illustrious career began in Brooklyn, some 40 years ago, at the Downstate medical school; a psychiatric residency at the attached King's County Hospital followed. Like the Dodgers', his path as well would eventually move, with the Downstate Institute, away from those environs.
EG: Len, how did you first become interested in analysis and then in analytic training? Given the wide array of your interests and knowledge, especially in literature, did you ever consider entering a different field? Did you ever wish to be solely a writer?
“My candidate years were in many ways marked by the exciting aura of Psychoanalysis Triumphant in academic psychiatry.”
LS: My interest in psychoanalysis began when I was 15 and first read Freud's Introductory Lectures. Here, I thought in my naive enthusiasm, is Mind and Truth. I hope the naivete is gone, but my opinion hasn't changed. When I was drafted at 18 to serve in World War II, I carried that Freud book and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past through Africa and India; I still own those slightly mildewed and extensively underlined copies.
It was always assumed in my family that I would become a physician. My parents exerted no overt direction or persuasion. I accepted this expectation reluctantly, for my early wish was to be a writer and literary critic. But I rationalized, Chekhov was a doctor. Reading Freud and the inspiring example of Lionel Trilling, whose courses I took every semester at Columbia College, determined my “compromise formation” (little did I know then that Charlie Brenner was my exemplar here).
I went to medical school in order to become a psychoanalyst My resolve was reinforced there by the late Bill Console, a wonderful teacher in the medical school and residency and a future director of the Downstate Institute, who influenced so many of my Downstate colleagues to go into psychiatry. Bill was a zealot about psychoanalysis, and for us, being a psychiatrist automatically meant being an analyst. Six fellow classmates became analysts, including Larry Deutsch, Austin Silver, and Dick Yazmajian, all of whom also went to the Downstate Institute. It never occurred to me to apply elsewhere—after all, Bill Console was at Downstate.
For me this was a happy choice. I was soon spotted as a potential teacher, and the early trial and inclusion of young graduates as teachers, which still prevails in our institute, allowed me to establish myself as a faculty member right after graduation. In much of my writing—my first paper (on Chekhov) was written over 30 years ago—I used literature to illustrate clinical findings, and so I have really been able to combine psychoanalysis with my interest in literary criticism. I was the kind of kid whom everyone confided in, and from the time I was five or six years old I was writing and illustrating my own “books.” So I consider myself one of the happy few who are lucky enough to be living out the fulfillment of childhood wishes.
EG: When did you start your training at Downstate? That is, during what period of the Institute's history were you a candidate? Was the period of your training distant enough from the formative split from the New York Institute
and the central figures not to have had an impact on the atmosphere at the Downstate Institute? Or was it all still new enough to have figured into your student experience there?
“Downstate—now the NYU Institute—has been exceptionally lucky in being able to maintain a predominantly free and friendly atmosphere among its faculty.”
My candidate years were in many ways marked by the exciting aura of Psychoanalysis Triumphant in academic psychiatry. We were one of the first institutes to be attached to a medical school department of psychiatry. A distinguished psychiatrist, Howard Potter, was the department head, and he was friendly toward analysis.
Many of the faculty members were graduates of the New York Psychoanalytic, and several taught at both institutes. Downstate had by then attracted a good faculty and a group of superb candidates, many of whom have contributed significantly to our literature.
In the Downstate's middle period (just before and after my graduation) those trained at the New York and the Columbia Institutes, or in Europe, were in charge of things. In the third period—in which we still are—graduates became faculty, supplemented by many talented people who continue to come over from the New York Institute. At the same time, the administrative leadership was assumed by our own graduates. Alan Eisnitz was the first and I was the second, of those indigenous Institute leaders.
Becoming director meant (and still means) first serving as secretary of the Education Committee, then as Education Committee chairman, then as associate director—each for three years—prior to assuming leadership. The executive power is derived from the Education Committee; the leadership is shared with the chairman of the Education Committee. There is a cabinet-style Executive Committee. But the director is the ultimate leader.
During Mark Kanzer's term as director, when Bill Console was chairman of the Education Committee, I was appointed as assistant to the chairman of the Curriculum Committee. When Bill Console became chairman, he named me chairman of the Curriculum Committee. I was very young and awed by the job. But in these two positions I was determined to get to know the curriculum and redesign and coordinate it. I sat in on all the classes over a period of years and fashioned a model curriculum and a way of monitoring it that is still in use. Perhaps that is my main contribution to the Institute.
Downstate—now the NYU Institute—has been exceptionally lucky in being able to maintain a predominantly free and friendly atmosphere among its faculty. We have had little fratricidal tension and much of the pleasure of working with people who like and respect one another.
EG: What precipitated the Institute's move from Downstate to NYU?
LS: The move from Downstate was motivated by many factors, most of them having little to do with psychoanalysis. I think the main reason was that it simply was becoming more and more dangerous just to be walking around the streets in Brooklyn near Downstate, and prospective as well as current residents and analytic candidates regarded our geography as a distinct disadvantage. NYU offered us a better location.
We had a powerful and distinguished chairman of the Psychiatry Department in Bob Cancro; he was friendly and knowledgeable about psychoanalysis, and he welcomed us as potential teachers in the medical school and residency. It was during my directorship that the decision to move was made; it was during the next administration, that of Roy Lilleskov, that NYU was chosen and the move was made.
EG: Has the move achieved its purpose? Were there any significant problems?
LS: There was a lot of work and trouble but few problems attached to the move. We went from one medical school base to another. Now we have the benefit of a connection with a major general university and enjoy the benefits of mutually staffed study groups with other departments and divisions of the university, both graduate and undergraduate.
EG: Let's move on to your own work. I guess that probably your most widely known work is on what you've termed “soul murder.” How did you get interested in the area of child abuse?
LS: I first became interested in child abuse in residency, when one of my first cases was a very disturbed mother who seemed intent on killing her child. She tried to keep him in a crib long after it ought to have been discarded. He would climb out and she would build the crib sides higher and higher until he was generally injuring himself and finally broke some bones.
I could sense the excited and terrified drive to murder in that woman, as well as her torment over it. I believe I helped her temporarily by the most unanalytic, authoritarian methods; but I did learn from her something about the compulsion to repeat a tormented past in relation to one's own children. My first three control cases were men who had been, or felt that they had been, seduced as children.
“Soul murder” as a designation came from Schreber, and from Henrik Ibsen and Strindberg. As I have written, there is at least a touch of soul murder in everyone. It affects us both as subject and as object—a truth inherent in Hamlet's “use every man after his desert and who shall 'scape whipping?”
Some people assume I had a terrible childhood like those I have written about. That kind of assumption led one of my irreverent relatives to exclaim to someone asking about my early years, “He was spoiled rotten!”
LS: I started at the Downstate Institute after the first generation of students there, toward the end of Sandor Lorand's 10-year, somewhat absolutist reign as director. The pocket revolution that unseated him occurred while I was a candidate; a more democratic, rotating, limited-term kind of leadership was initiated. As candidates, we were protected by our elders from any awareness of what must have been tumultuous and troublesome struggles for power.
I think that soul murder highlights the fact that we as therapists deal not just with fantasies and external traumatic events, but with the impact of those events on the fantasy life of the individual. That impact varies tremendously and is dealt with in myriad ways, but there are strong resemblances and common defenses in those people who were massively traumatized as children, analogous to what one sees in concentrations camp survivors.
EG: Given the growing social concern with child abuse, did you anticipate the intense interest your book has evoked? I'm thinking especially of the unusual attention paid by the general press, for example, the very positive review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review.
LS: I certainly expected interest in
the topic, but I thought that the book would appeal mostly to those in mental health work. I was surprised—and delighted—by the reviews in the Times and so were my editors at Yale University Press. A book published by a university press doesn't usually get such coverage.
EG: I remember being taught in my training that cases in which actual seduction occurred would inevitably prove unanalyzable or, at best, be analyzable only to a limited degree. Your book seems to be an argument against this position.
LS: A human being should never be reduced to his or her pathology, much less to psychopathological circumstance. One should be wary of generalizing. Specifically, analyzability should not be judged on the basis of psychogenetic events or general conditions or loose diagnostic categories like “homosexual,” “narcissistic,” psychotic,“ ”borderline.“ I am particularly fed up with the useless and ungrammatical phrase, ”This patient is a borderline.“
Assessment of analyzability is an individual matter. We analysts know more about defects, symptoms, and inhibitions than we do about talents and strengths. The most important criterion for analyzability, in my view, is the prospective analysand's capacity for caring about another human being.
One makes a bet on analyzability with a trial of analysis. It's not a blind bet, of course, but one informed by psychic “facts” as well as by intuition.
Still, there are some people one feels sure are not analyzable—although one can never be sure beforehand one way or the other. I have been repeatedly surprised by the upset of early expectations, both positive and negative.
People who have suffered extensive trauma have been scarred by it; they have massive defenses and resistances. But many of these people have been strengthened by having to devise methods of surviving and transcending crushing blows—methods that attest to health and contribute to talents and ego flexibility, as well as to pathology. And some people have inherent gifts as well. Here is an instance of the importance of what we do not know. I feel that I have definitely helped a number of soul murder victims with analysis.
EG: Beyond the topics of soul murder, child abuse and deprivation, and the pathogenesis and treatment of such problems, your book contains a variety of themes and discussions that reach beyond those topics to some of the most basic ideas and controversies in psychoanalysis—the nature of “reality,” historical versus narrative truth, the relationship between valid emotionality as lived and experienced and the economic point of view in metapsychology. Do you intend to expand on these broader topics at some point?
LS: Some of the topics you mentioned will be dealt with in a book I am currently writing on aspects of human development during the life cycle: narcissism, symbolism, love, the meaning of death. At present I'm not sure that it will come off. It may be too much for me. People seem to vary in their style of thinking; I think best when I am actually writing and so am never quite sure just where I am going to end up and whether the trip will be worthwhile. Apart from what I am putting into this book, I do have a number of clinical observations I want to write about. I have many interests, ideas, and projects in the area of analysis applied to literature and art. Theory is not my strong point, although I have ventured into it especially in my first book, Halo in the Sky, not reviewed by the New York Times but perhaps the more important of my two published books. I do expect to keep on writing.
EG: What is your assessment of the “state of psychoanalysis” at present? And what about its future? Does it appear to you to be endangered, assured, or unclear as a treatment and as a theory?
LS: Freud made discoveries about the human mind that will remain part of civilized thought as long as civilized thought remains. I do have a generally pessimistic, but far from hopeless, view of human nature and of the future that stems largely from my belief (based on clinical experience) in the power of the destructive drive. Both our culture in general and psychoanalysis in particular are endangered by the erosion of the values of individualism.
Lionel Trilling found some comfort in Freud's idea of a biological legacy that might serve as a constructive, evolutionary, unconscious force to protect us against the deterioration of our culture and our moral values—if there is a death instinct there is also a life instinct. I hope he is right. I am neither a philosopher nor a prophet and I don't feel that I have—or that any psychoanalyst has—anything certain or expert to add to the confused complexity of such large issues.
One of my favorite quotations from Freud is one at he wrote in a letter to Jung—he was perhaps unwittingly making an interpretation: “Only a scoundrel gives more than he has.” I tend to take pragmatic views. I would like to plump for conservatism, especially in the face of the many current efforts to divorce the body and the drives from psychology. I think we should be aware that we are standing on the shoulders of giants and appreciate why we have our vantage point not attack our heritage while we look ahead. At the same time, I am for the utmost liberalism in relation to the extension of our knowledge and the need not only to tolerate but to seek out new ideas.
EG: Apropos the issue of new ideas, let's end with this: What do you think is the most vital theoretical challenge or question at this juncture in our history?
LS: I don't have any favorite theoretical dilemmas. Many questions and phenomena will always be beyond us, for example, a detailed knowledge of the “prenatal” stage of the mind, of the first “unrememberable,” as Al Frank termed it, year or so of life, although they are worth thinking about, researching, and observing. I believe that we need some genius who can take another look at the psychoses—I mean study the psychic mechanisms involved, not just of the obviously important organic and chemical factors.
I think, along with Melanie Klein, Otto Kernberg, and others, that in our theory we have underestimated the role of murder and of the aggressive instinct Murder lurks, as it were, at every stage of our development. And, in the form in which it is the most difficult to bear—parentocide—it is a part of the Oedipus complex, often neglected, as Leowald reminds us—a challenge to the task of the necessary transcendent and integrative resolutions of the oedipal period. Murder as an intrapsychic force continues with us and increases in its pathogenic potential, usually manifest in predominantly attenuated form and primarily directed against the self, from middle into old age. Theoretically, one might view this as the problem of the death instinct, but however moot that issue is, clinically we find that murder directed toward others and toward the self is always there. I'm reminded of Freud's quoting Charcot in the Interpretation of Dreams: “Theory is good, but it doesn't prevent the facts from existing.”