We are in Dr. Spruiell's upstairs computer room, once a boy's bedroom. It's big enough, but at first glance seems cramped, packed with bookshelves, manuals, files, articles being reviewed, and, amid all this, works of art. In the middle of the room, framed by a big desk, side and back tables jammed with computer and telecommunications equipment, is a sort of “command center.” For all its work-related furnishings, there is a cozy warmth to the room, with its bank of windows shuttered with wooden blinds, spots of color, and the smell of fresh coffee.
Macgregor: I've wondered, how did you get your name?
Spruiell: Most people are surprised that it's Scottish—there are still Spruiells there. An ancestor with that name came to Virginia just about 300 years ago. Vann is the name of a family one of my grandfathers liked. The family was said to be descended from a Creek Indian who took what he thought was an Anglicized name. Most of my people settled in the Appalachian part of Alabama about 165 years ago.
Macgregor: I'd guess there weren't too many analysts produced in that part of the country. How did you originally become interested in analysis?
Spruiell: Not many. But we had libraries. Like a lot of other people, when I was 15 or 16 I was prowling around in the stacks of one in Birmingham, trying to find myself somewhere in there. I hit upon a book by Freud—I don't remember now which one it was. I read that and a couple of others and was absolutely enthralled. And stayed enthralled, but took some detours in medical school, toward inter nal medicine, pediatrics, and then neurophysiology.
Macgregor: Did something turn you toward analytic training, after all the detours?
Spruiell: Well, I got into analysis as a medical student, a control patient. Among other things, I wanted to try to make sure I wouldn't go into analysis because of my neurosis. I never did get really sure, but finally decided it was safe to go ahead with a psychiatric residency. Now I think that's sort of funny; the whole worry was part of my neurosis.
Macgregor: That was my next question — how important do you think your educational background in psychiatry is to your being an analyst?
Spruiell: It was important for me. The particular kind of analyst and man I am has a lot to do with medicine and psychiatry. I don't believe I could have gotten interested in multidisciplinary research—correlating multiple variables in different systems, for instance—without my medical training. That gave me a certain framework that helped make me a particular kind of person, gave me a certain way to become the analyst I am. If I had been from another field I would have developed in some other way. Maybe that would have been as good or better, but the tie to medicine was very important and still is.
Macgregor: You're making me recognize a central theme—multiple interactions of subsystems within larger systems—running through your papers.
Spruiell: I've been interested in that kind of thing a long time. Maybe it's the way my mind worked from childhood. Of all the things in medicine, I loved physiology and neurophysiology most. I like to know or at least try to think about the structure of things behind appearances, but even more the ways things work and how they got that way. In medical school I had a chance to take an elective and work in a multidisciplinary research project on the frontal lobes in the old Boston Psychopathic under Milton Greenblatt. This was an enormous project, before computers became common in medical research. Even back then it must have taken millions of dollars to fund because it had psychiatrists, neurologists, surgeons, neurophysiologists, physiologists, sociologists, group dynamics people, religious people (a priest, a rabbi, and a minister), hordes of statisticians. It even had a psychoanalyst, Elizabeth Zetzel. She scared me a lot. Many, many variables were handled statistically. It was amazing to see so many cross-correlations among them from different systems that had no apparent relationship with each other—statistically significant correlations. Any one of them could have been the subject for a special research project. Most of those connections still have not been run down. Then later, as a psychiatrist at Tulane, I took part in a large-scale, long-term project on the adaptational changes in medical students. We did have a regional computer at Tulane, but it was not as powerful as the one right here in this room. That was in the late fifties and early sixties. That team was among the first in psychiatry to try to use the computer that way to shape the handling and correlation of variables.
Macgregor: Do you think we've come far enough in neural research on the brain to be able to integrate it with theories of the mind, particularly analytic theories?
Spruiell: Not yet. Only in the beginnings of some of the most gross kinds of things like those having to do with major shifts in affects, alterations of consciousness, and so forth. We may be just beginning to get some correlations. The neural sciences are so promising, but most of the good things for psychoanalysis lie in the future. As far as I can see there is very little now that we can contribute to them or they to us. They do need a theory of mind, and one of the problems of neural scientists is that most of them have very superficial theories of mind. So maybe for now we have more to offer them than they us. This is one of the reasons why the new theories of complexity are going to help. For the first time it will be possible to define similar patterns—but in the future, not now.
Macgregor: Who has influenced your analytic thinking the most? Any particular person or persons?
Spruiell: Winnicott was important to me early on, and still is in terms of his clinical understanding of some “sicker” but still analyzable patients. When I went into practice I worked with a lot of people who were relatively disturbed. I found Winnicott helpful and still find him so. A lot of his basic thoughts—not particularly his theory—fit in with those of Loewald. There are a number of other mentors and peers who influenced me, too many to talk about here.
Macgregor: Were there any pivotal experiences in your career?
Spruiell: Several. First was getting trained, getting through the formal part of it, and trying to put that part in the past.
Macgregor: Many analysts wouldn't make that kind of comment. But if you've been through analytic training and you know what an ordeal it was— Spruiell: It's an interference, really. It's necessary—you have to go through it. But it's still an interference with the work. John Klauber once said it takes an average analyst about ten years to get over the training and find what's valid in his own self to be used in his work.
Macgregor: I think I can identify with that.
Spruiell: Most of us can. There's always an intruder when you're trying to work with a patient as a candidate. Sometimes it's many intruders. Analysis is a very intimate and private thing, and you're not sure what is right for you while you're in training and being buffeted by so many opinions. Klauber said he found himself making interpretations for years that his analyst or his supervisors made, and some of them didn't have any real meaning for him with his own patients. He had to gradually find out what he wanted to say, in his own voice.
Macgregor: The other pivotal experiences?
Spruiell: Several years after safely graduating, three friends and I—all about the same age—began to meet as a study group when we found that none of us could define in any decent way what we meant by the id! We found out that we could hardly define anything in the same ways theoretically and weren't sure what we believed about anything. We began to try to hash it out and see what we agreed or disagreed about. It was a very alive little study group for years. Once, we decided that we ought to get a consultant and somebody asked, “Why not write Charles Brenner?” Of course we didn't know him. But I did write, and to my astonishment he let us know he'd be glad to come down. So we chipped in some money and he came down and spent a wonderful weekend with the four us, and has kept an interest in us ever since. Brenner made us all write papers, and he read them very carefully before he came. They were terrible papers. But he was very decent about them and we learned more that weekend than ever before. We at least got our feet on the ground. it changed all bur lives, that one weekend. I've kept contact with Brenner since then and I'm grateful to him.
Macgregor: I think that personal contact with analysts of experience sustains a lot of us a lot more than we've ever admitted.
Spruiell: Well one of the things Brenner did was—he respected our dignity. We were vulnerable and very afraid of him, too, but he took us seriously and could translate a lot of things we were saying and asking. We left feeling that we might really be analysts after all.
Macgregor: And were there other pivotal experiences?
Spruiell: The others came out of the first two. Like so many others of my generation I had worked ever since I was a kid—in the army, medical school, and so on. I'd always craved the sabbatical year some academics get. I wasn't an academic, so I decided to work for my own—one to take place in my early forties. I set up an opportunity and was lucky that my family was willing to take this adventure. So we spent a year in London and I was a guest at the Hampstead Clinic. This was the kind of break that was quite wonderful, and for a while I didn't know what to do with myself because I was so used to being programmed by what I had to do. The year was a chance to open up in a lot of directions. The year? 1972-73.
Macgregor: Can you share some of your memories, or some anecdotes?
Spruiell: There probably are too many. I met a lot of people, including the various visitors who came, and of course, particularly, Anna Freud. The people coming alive in person—running into them—made their ideas come alive in a very different way for me. I also have the collective pivotal experiences that came with all sorts of analysts later. You know, we live in a sort of nationwide village—even a global village. But it takes time to become a citizen in it, to get known, to get to know other people. As times goes on, and as our place becomes more an electronic village, it will get easier. Home towns are great, but it's important to be able to leave them, to get to know other people in other places.
“… the core of analytic theory and practice amounts to the only coherent and deep general theory of mind available that is sustained by an intellectual discipline.”
Macgregor: You've written a number of papers on narcissism. Here's a question that may be a zinger. Do we really need a theory of narcissism, or could the rest of our current body of knowledge suffice? Could w3e speak of ego ideal functions, for example, without using the word narcissism?
Spruiell: I think it's a perfectly good question. A number of people, Lewin for example, always thought that the theoretical development of narcissism—Freud's development of these theories—was in some ways an abandonment of an older theory that needed to be restored later. Actually, Freud never did work out his theory of narcissism to bring it into consonance with the later structural theory. It's still a confused and confusing set of concepts rather than a single integrated concept. After a time, I got tired of the subject and wished there weren't a single term for it. Actually we are talking about the changes in individuation and the development of object relations along with drives as part of the whole system of mind, and we could easily do without the term narcissism. I suppose I'm sort of in between. The problem always is the isolation of one part of being human and focusing on that. Other parts get blurred, or are not seen at all, so the whole thing becomes distorted. Then we try to put the humanity back into the concept, and wonder why we took that trip in the first place.
Macgregor: The topic could occasion a monograph—but can you really write about it without reference to all the systems of the mind?
Spruiell: I almost did that—write a monograph on narcissism, with reference to all the systems of mind. I put together a book that was going to be called Three Strands of Narcissism, and rewrote as chapters most of the papers I've written on the subject. I had about two-thirds or three-fourths of it finished, and then dropped it. It may be that I'll go back and redo it. But I wasn't happy about it for the reasons you mention. Putting together what I had wasn't really satisfying to me. I lost interest in the book.
Macgregor: We've been dealing with your scientific thoughts and interests, but I'd like to turn to some of your political opinions.
Spruiell: Well, I have lots of them—probably too many for my own good. Here I'd like to center on politics in its best sense.
Macgregor: What do you see as the primary purpose of our psychoanalytic organizations?
Spruiell: We have to remember that the core of analytic theory and practice amounts to the only coherent and deep general theory of mind available that is sustained by an intellectual discipline. That is, it happens to be backed by a cadre of workers who work sufficiently well within a framework that they can find general agreement and support, but also, more importantly, constructive conflicts with each other. None of the rival theories of mind have been capable of developing coherent disciplinary groups. Thus, we have no rival. We are the only group that effectively represents the attempt to craft a better and better theory of mind. That is extraordinarily important. If there is no rival, and “psychoanalysis” by that name disappears, are we to do without a theory—to be “mindless”? No. Analysts might disappear but unless all the other people do, the ideas won't. Once Freud let the cat out of the bag, there's no putting it back.
Macgregor: You mentioned in your paper about Kuhn that as new paradigms arise in a revolutionary way, the old adherents struggle against it, but that if the paradigm is successful, the old is thrown away. And you suggested that someday a new revolution might occur in analysis. Do you still see that happening?
Spruiell: A revolution is occurring in science itself. And it almost certainly is true, as Freud thought, that psychoanalysis will come to be thought of in different ways. But the suggestions of many that new paradigms within psychoanalysis have already been found are, I think, in error. I don't doubt that psychoanalysis can become more scientific, more related to other disciplines. We will be able to redo
our metapsychology. But a true rival within psychoanalysis will have to operate on the basis of a new paradigm that will allow at least equal, preferably better, explanations for known phenomena that our present theory can make generalizations about—and the new paradigm should be ale to encompass some phenomena the present one can't. If it can't do those things, what is proposed as new will screen us—separate us—from old and verified observations.
Macgregor: Your remarks remind me of your paper, “The Indivisibility of Drive Theory and Object Relations Theory.”
Spruiell: The idea of indivisibility of object relations and drive/conflict theory is really part of a large systems approach. Whitehead was one of the primary philosophical proponents of it, and several physiologists were among the scientific proponents. Incidentally, Piaget very distinctly insisted upon the same idea: that everything is connected with everything; you can't take a part of a system in process out without influencing every other part; you can't alter one of these variables without altering all of the others. Now these ideas have become not only matters of philosophical or scientific speculation but documented facts. We can see now from our capacities to make complex computer models of real world systems in process what the mathematicians could see with pure numbers: that no variable in complex equations and systems can be altered without every other being influenced—often in ways that could not have been imagined. This is a much, much more complicated view than the old concept of homeostasis—a homeostatic system always returns to a state of equilibrium, but most systems do not.
Macgregor: A lot of attention is being paid to the ways analysts lisien — what do you think about the activity of the analyst as he or she listens?
Spruiell: I think our attentiveness oscillates—like our affective states. Lewin and Isak-ower stressed that. A mind just does that unless we consciously impinge upon it, direct our attention and organize it. The nature of these conscious interruptions of nondirected or non-directive thought is one of our most interesting questions. Some result in interventions that are interpretations and some in interventions that aren't. Greenacre said she listened to patients as she might listen to music. It's a kind of passivity that's not a true passivity—it's a kind of surrender to a process. It's not trying to alter the process, not trying to replace the “music” you hear unless you're hearing it critically for that purpose. You let yourself take it in, allow it to happen to you. Then you can hear into it. She said that one of the worst things is to have a strongly invested theory on your mind when you're listening to a patient, because then you'll listen for the things that fit the theory and leave out the other things. Of course Greenacre didn't mean that there is not oscillation toward another pole—the “what in the world is going on here?” kind of interruption of your listening, the subjection of the fantasies you and your patient are having to critical examination. That is active and necessary and constitutes the other pole of the oscillation. But other kinds of activity are interferences. Menninger, for example, believed if you get the idea you are supposed to do something with a patient, and you are thrashing around looking for something to do, you're trying to do something impossible, at least within an analytic frame. You can be the person you are—and that means, if you are capable of getting anywhere at all in this field, that you are reasonably benign, sense and respect other people's feelings, have learned to check your needs to own or control other people, and so on. But beyond that, within the analytic frame you can't do anything useful except make interpretive interventions and try to confine others to those things said that are nondirective, nonintrusive, and nonexploitative. If you do anything else, assuming an analytic process is safely underway, in a sense you're doing violence to your own mind in the same way patients do when they try to force themselves to have feelings they don't have, or ideas they imagine the analyst wants them to have, or do things other people want them to do that don't feel part of themselves. You can't will ideas—at least not good ones. Trying to do that amounts to an internal resistance that interferes with the analytic work. There are times, of course, when it's necessary to intervene in nonanalytic ways, and then you temporarily or permanently abandon the analytic frame—but I'm not talking about those times.
“I don't believe anybody except a genius like Freud has more than one or two original ideas in a whole lifetime, and maybe none at all.”
Macgregor: You've written extensively, and among your papers are comments that Freud's ideas often came from his self-analysis. I don't know if that's true or not. Where do your ideas come from and how do you develop them?
Spruiell: I don't believe anybody except a genius like Freud has more than one or two original ideas in a whole lifetime, and maybe none at all. But all of us have a style that goes along with a certain character. I don't believe that I have any special talents except maybe two: I think I've always had—since long before I knew what psychoanalysis was—a capacity to take a sweeping view of a field, a tendency to look for apparent separations and to look for what's missing, but not on conscious or particularly rational levels. Another way of saying it is that since childhood I haven't accepted things at face value. And the second talent is patience. My best ideas have been ideas that other people have had, but have come to me and become my own from “allowing” them to come, especially integrating and synthesizing patterns. I'm fascinated with the ways parts relate to each other and create a whole that is more than any mere sum of the parts. Now where did I get those interests? I don't know. I've already said that I appreciated physiology, for example, but I had these tendencies long before that. I hated most of medical school but I loved physiology. It wasn't just because of the teachers. I hated large parts of medical school. Like bacteriology. I had a fine teacher but hated the subject. But I have to add—sometimes great teachers can make anything interesting. I think Rudolph Loewenstein could have made anything interesting—maybe even bacteriology—if he were interested himself.
Macgregor: You've written papers on a wide range of subjects: adolescence, creativity, narcissism, object relations theory, the “self,” screen phenomena, organismic theory and practice, folk philosophy, the philosophy of science, the rules and frames of the analytic situation, strictly clinical papers, what Freud thought was the joke in his paper on Michelangelo's Moses, blaming, and now, deterministic chaos. Is there a common thread running through them?
Spruiell: I think so—although I didn't consciously plan it that way. It's the developmental theme of separations that lead either to individuation and growth—or pathology. Sometimes, combinations of the two. The themes of epigenetic organization, boundaries, communication across boundaries, representations. Or interferences caused by external material deficits or through multidetermined functional compromises, which may or may not be reversible. Above all, it's the appreciation of what might be called the smart unconscious and the automatic, unthinking unconscious, and the relations between those processes and those we can at least potentially experience as part of consciousness. All this is an interest in the process aspects of mind. That's fun as far as I'm concerned.
Macgregor: Organizationally, is there one thing you've done that you're proudest of?
Spruiell: The opportunity to follow Eddie Weinshel as North American editor of the International Journal and the International Review. Nothing I've done with other analysts has been so rewarding and stimulating. I'm very proud of that.