Phyllis Greenacre died on October 24, 1989, at the age of 95. She had worked actively until the age of 90. Even to have reached that age might in itself be considered an achievement; to have arrived there with her tremendous accomplishments is awe inspiring. Those who know her work will find the words “awe inspiring” appropriate, because she defined the psychoanalytic meaning of experiences of awe and inspiration.
Dr. Greenacre was born on May 3, 1894, to the upper middle class family of a Chicago lawyer. She was the fourth of seven children, one of twins; the other died shortly after birth. She had a speech impediment that made communication with others difficult, and she was not able to speak intelligibly until the age of seven. She was, however, taught to read and write early, perhaps at the age of three or four, and communicated by means of notes for several years.
It may be that her talent for the written word, echoing the resonance of the human voice, was fostered by the adversity as well as by her talent. She always wanted to write a novel based on a dream. Phyllis Greenacre wrote the most beautiful and evocative prose in psychoanalysis after Freud himself. She found a distinctive voice, one all her own and unique in psychoanalysis, simple, in the tradition of American letters, and devoid of jargon.
It was at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where she moved after receiving her medical degree from Chicago's Rush Medical College in 1916, that, under the influence of Adolf Meyer, she began to mold that special combination of biology and psychology that informed her life's work. In 1928, she moved to New York and became consulting psychiatrist to the Department of Child Welfare in Westchester County. At about the same time, she first became interested in psychoanalysis. She never lost her first enthusiasm for analysis and, in fact, was analyzed three times, first with a Jungian. It seems almost inevitable that she was the second analyst for many colleagues.
In 1932, Dr. Greenacre joined the staff of the Payne Whitney Clinic at Cornell Medical College in New York City and shortly thereafter began her psychoanalytic training—17 years after she first began psychiatry! She always maintained that the many years of general and child psychiatry helped her tremendously in her work, that the sheer numbers of interviews provided a vast supply of psychological data that the analyst in practice could never see.
Phyllis Greenacre completed her psychoanalytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1937 and became a training and supervising analyst as well as a lecturer, there in 1938. She was president of the Institute for two terms and president of the Society for one term and a member of the boards of both organizations. She served on the Educational Committee, the Admissions Committee, and the Students Committee for many years. She gave up most of her organizational functions in the early '60s, when she was nearly 70 years old. She was Emeritus Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell Medical College from 1946.
In 1988, a longtime friend asked Dr. Greenacre if she liked to reread her papers. “Why would I want to do that?” she replied; she said she had so many new things to think about! Ninety-three years old, crippled with arthritis, Phyllis Greenacre was nevertheless curious about life, never dwelling on her past accomplishments.
During her lifetime, she wrote more than 60 papers and several books. She herself classified her papers into three broad areas (excluding the several early papers on psychopathology and neurobiology): clinical studies of development studies in creativity, and psychoanalytic therapy and training. The first of her psychoanalytic works, in 1941, was “The Predisposition to Anxiety,” which she thought might be the finest of all her works. In that article, published in two parts in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Dr. Greenacre reviewed the theory of anxiety from its beginnings to the then current observational research.
In “The Biologic Economy of Birth,” which followed in 1945, Dr. Greenacre boldly related the cephalad development of the growing fetus and the nature of the use of the head in birth with the overriding principle of the growth of the mental apparatus in phytogeny and ontogeny. Many of her ideas were attacked as revolutionary, but she never wavered in her commitment to observation as an investigative tool.
Certain of her papers on development stand out: “The Prepuberty Trauma in Girls,” “A Contribution to the Study of Screen Memories,” “Respiratory Incorporation and the Phallic Phase,” “Experiences of Awe in Childhood,” “Toward an Understanding of the Physical Nucleus of Some Defense Actions.”
In the area of creativity, she wrote papers on “The Mutual Adventures of Jonathan Swift and Lemuel Gulliver,” “The Childhood of the Artist,” “The Impostor,” “Play in Relation to Creative Imagination,” and works on Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Hans Christian Anderson. Finally, there is the vast number of papers on psychoanalytic therapy and training, including articles on festishism, acting out, transference and countertransference, the perversions, and reconstruction.
She seemed to be a big woman in height and girth. Her face was tempered, like that of a pioneer woman, her hair pulled back into a casual bun. But behind her stoic facade her eyes blazed with curiosity and fascination, betraying the fire that could spread to her features in a passionate moment. It may have been a legacy of the speech difficulty that Phyllis Greenacre spoke not to groups but only to individuals, in an almost conspiratorial tone.
She was a dear friend, a generous, warm woman with a passionate devotion to her friends and students. She gave her time and ear to them and continued her friendships for scores of years, often at great distances. She was the advisor most sought after for consultation about difficult cases. Though she was separated from her original family, save for a sister with whom she remained close, she was a concerned and loving mother and grandmother. She entertained graciously, for she had a love of company and good conversation.
When the news of her death came, I could not be sad, because her last years were not happy so impaired was she by arthritis, unable to do any work. But, I thought, Phyllis Greenacre is dead, and the last of the pioneer giants of psychoanalysis on whose shoulders we have all stood is gone.