David Rapaport, with degrees in both physics and psychology emigrated from Hungary in 1938 with his wife and two daughters in flight from the Nazis. He was helped in his escape by the psychoalytic Lawrence Kubie, who was very active in rescuing European Jews connected to psychoanalysis (see TAP 23:2/3). Rapaport was briefly in New York and then went to Osawatomie State Hospital in Kansas. During his short stay there he was already doing research on metrazol convulsive therapy. While in New York he had met Karl Menninger and demonstrated his psychological tests, with Dr. Karl as the subject. The Rorschach is extant somewhere.
Dr. Karl like to tell the story that when Rapaport described projective techniques he responded: “Why go to all that trouble? Just show me a man's hat and I'll tell you as much.” It is a tribute to Dr. Karl that he was able to see the potential in this prickly, alien immigrant Jew. In 1940 he offered David a position at the clinic, in part because of the illness of Junius Brown, then chief psychologist. David quickly launched his psychological testing program, which soon became a staple of the work of psychologists everywhere.
Naturally, anecdotes began to accumulate about this strange man translocated from Budapest to middle America with his odd accent, his rapid, jerky stride, and jacket over his shoulders in European cape style. I can tell a few anecdotes the newer generation may not have heard. When David made inquiry after the Rorschach of a patient who had given only anatomical responses, the patient replied, “Why do you show me these dirty pictures!”
Rapaport introduced the Hungarian Szondi test in America. The test consists of a series of pictures of murderers, schizophrenics, and similar unfortunates. The subject is asked which of the pictures he likes best and which least. His choices are supposed to give a clue to his own diagnosis. One patient said in response to the array of pictures: “Friends of yours, I presume?”
Although David was soon fluent in English, he retained a marked accent. He used to say “Thanks” after every test response, but he pronounced it “Senks.” Many patients thought he was saying “sex.”
David was already a confirmed Freudian when he arrived in Topeka. He soon published Emotions and Memory , a psychodynamic study of memory functioning and before long had produced an extensive two-volume work on psychological testing, which has since been reworked by Robert Holt into a one-volume revised and clarified text, still widely used. David quickly recognized the talent of Roy Schafer, who assisted in the work and soon himself became a foremost expert in psychological testing, a career long since eclipsed by his important work in psychoanalytic theory and practice. As a psychiatric resident, my role in the work, generously acknowledged by David, was to interview members of the Kansas highway patrol as a normal control group. There remains a question of how representative they were of normality.
Appointed head of research, David rapidly and energetically put together one of the foremost psychological research teams in the country. Principal research areas were cognitive styles, infancy, hypnosis, and a study of residents begun on their entering training, with predictions and follow-up through their stay at Menninger. David was a brilliant teacher of psychoanalytic theory, with an astonishingly encyclopedic grasp of Freud and an inimitable clarity and fervor. Those lucky enough to have heard him will never forget his classes, not least because of his fierce demands that the Freudian text be minutely studied, with a dialectic of style of argumentation that surely owed much to the way his forefathers had studied the Talmud. His works remain a major creative explication of Freudian theory, now of course the subject of major controversy about Freudian metapsychology.
In 1948, David, Margaret Brenman, and I left Menninger to join Robert Knight, who the year before had become head of the Austin Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. But that, as they say, is another story.