An almost legendary anecdote has it that a wealthy and very well dressed businessman, of some height and considerable bulk, was once referred to Lou Shapiro. The patient had recently moved to Chicago and wanted “the best analyst in town.” He had been given Lou's name. When the man stood up to meet his prospective analyst, who had just come out into the waiting room, he stared down at the short elderly man and hesitated. Lou looked up, smiled, and said, “Come on in, anyway.”
Any historical account of the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago would be incomplete without some acknowledgment of the man who can rightly be called its elder statesman—a psychoanalyst who in many ways exemplifies the spirit of psychoanalysis in Chicago over the past sixty years. Louis B. Shapiro, as David Terman described him in 1986, on the occasion of Lou's eightieth birthday, helped to create a “distinctive Chicago style or school of analysis, similar to other Chicago creative fields such as architecture, painting, poetry, or even pizza!” As colleagues, students, and analysands of Lou's have learned over the years, following the “red thread of transference, resistance, and the emergence of the subjective self experience (both the patient's and the analyst's) is what brings the analysand, the analyst, and the process alive.”
At the age of eight-six, Lou still arrives at the Institute at five-thirty every morning. Usually he makes coffee for the office and then sees patients until about one, when he goes home to care for his wife Sophie, who has been ill the last few years. This morning routine is not unfamiliar to Lou, who even at the age of six would arise with his father at four-thirty in the morning to help deliver groceries on Chicago's West Side before going to school. Lou was the youngest of twelve children, although he was born seven years after the next youngest and spent most of his childhood as an only child with older parents. If he was not helping his father at the store, or his often sickly mother, he was reading books from the nearby library. When asked why he started reading Freud as a young adolescent, he responded, “F,” meaning that he had read most of the books on the shelves from A through E.
An excellent student in high school, Lou went on to complete his medical studies at the University of Illinois in 1931. The very next day he married Sophie, his wife of sixty-one years. After postgraduate work in neuropathology at Illinois and Northwestern, Lou took charge of the women's admissions unit at Elgin State Hospital in 1932, where he remained until 1939. In 1936, four years after Franz Alexander had opened the Chicago Institute, Lou came in from Elgin to be interviewed for psychoanalytic training. He applied for a Rockefeller grant to help pay for his training analysis and initially was turned down. He was told, off the record, that because he was Jewish, as so many applicants at that time were, he probably would not receive the grant. Only when George Read, the director at Elgin, intervened with Alexander did Lou receive a partial grant. Soon after, he began his first analysis with Therese Benedek, who only recently had arrived from Hungary. Lou rode the train in from Elgin each day (about a two-hour round trip) for a three o'clock analytic hour, then hurried back to the hospital, often working late into the evening admitting new patients. His goal of finding a cure for schizophrenia was consistent with the childhood longing to “do something important” in his life. During his tenure at Elgin, he published four articles on the treatment of psychosis, two of which appeared in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders.
Lou began classes at the Institute in 1938. Of the teachers and supervisors he most admired, Thomas French has always stood out: “He had a certain respect for patients and students that many of the others did not.” There was no set curriculum at the time, just classes and case presentations. Lou remembers Alexander being very much an “entrepreneur” on the Institute's behalf, creating publicity and raising money. At the time Lou applied, Alexander offered to speak with Read regarding a flexible work schedule, and to that end traveled out to Elgin. He was later quoted in a newspaper article as saying that he had been mistaken for a patient and temporarily prevented from leaving the hospital. Lou always suspected it was a publicity stunt, simply one more attempt to help the Institute become better known.
During the war, Lou was stationed in Texas, first as chief psychiatrist at Fort Bliss in El Paso, and later at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Returning to Chicago in 1946, he resumed work toward graduation from the Institute. Lou presented a case to the entire staff and was graduated. A few days later Alexander, impressed with the presentation, invited him to lunch. “Sophie was suspicious. She didn't trust the people at the Institute, and felt most of the analysts were crazy and needed analysis. She was afraid they would take advantage of me.”
It was over this lunch that Lou was invited to join the staff. In 1951 he was appointed Training Analyst, and in 1953, along with Heinz Kohut and Joan Fleming, he organized the first formal curriculum. Lou went on to become geographic coordinator for the Institute (consulting in Denver, St. Louis, and Cincinnati) and later served for a number of years as Dean. He is also a former president of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society and has served on numerous committees of The American.
Although Lou's administrative accomplishments and positions have been many, among colleagues and candidates at the Institute he is thought of primarily as a committed and talented clinician and teacher.
When asked what has had the greatest impact on his analytic work, Lou always has the same response. Last year, after winning his second Joan Fleming Award for Teaching Excellence, given by the Candidates' Association to the teacher who has had the most positive influence on their education, he remarked, “I really owe this award to the candidates. They have taught me about analysis, but more importantly, about myself.” It is well known at the Institute that when one or two analyses have not solved an analyst's personal difficulties, Lou Shapiro is the one to see. One former analysand, following two limited analytic experiences, has described why: “He was not a Freudian, not a Kohutian, just his honest self, listening to what I had to say and explaining what he thought.… he was personal, but still had a natural neutral distance that made talking to him safe and comfortable.… he said I should listen to my unconscious and tell him what it said and he would do the same. I immediately felt a sense of working together with him.… the red thread of the process was his focus and became my focus too … not a theory, not his own preconceived ideas.”
Lou has been known to say that he “trusted Freud until he became a theoretician,” and has always considered the technical papers to be the most valuable for any analyst, new or
Mark D. Smaller, P.h.D. is an advanced candidate at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and is working on a biography of Lou Shapiro.
experienced. In the case conference Lou taught for over forty years, his goal was to help candidates recognize the “two patients” who come into the office: “One is the character of the patient, and the other the authentic or subjective self of the patient trying to be known or genuinely listened to. The character has all the defenses, all the resistance, and you can't get put off by it. Never interpret defenses or resistance. Engage them, welcome them into your office. Interfere with resistance by trying to engage it in the process. Follow the thread, the affect, the self.… Do you hear it? Today, the real patient, not the character, came into the office. Isn't that great? Isn't that exciting?”
And no one can follow the person, the subjective self experience, like Lou can. Some have criticized him for not interpreting or analyzing negative transference. And he does not. He works with it, using Freud's principle of not interpreting transference unless it threatens the treatment. Lou considers Paul Federn's work an important contributor to his view of the subjective self, what Federn described as the medial (middle voice) cathexis of the ego. Federn, like Freud, used the terms “ego” and “self” interchangeably; he considered this focus essential, especially with more troubled patients. Some of Kohut's later work might even be traced to Federn's ideas. Lou's view highlights self experience (though he believes objects can be more than self-objects) as the analyst helps patients experience and observe themselves beyond their character and defenses. The ego or self experience should hold center stage in the analysis. From the moment the patient walks in for the first consultation, a “silent transference” develops, on which the analyst is always focused. What is not being said? If the analyst facilitates a process through engaging resistance, the analysis becomes the means to obtain “a connection to the self” or, to use Federn's German, erlebnis, the experience of feeling alive and thriving.
These brief remarks on Lou Shapiro's life and work offer but a brief glimpse of this man who over the years in Chicago has influenced so many. Shortly before Kohut presented his seminal paper on narcissism in the late sixties, he described in a meeting his supervision of a candidate who had been having serious difficulties. Lou had been so impressed that later he wrote Kohut a note saying that he would read and support all of his new ideas, which were reflected in the sensitivity of his work with the candidate and with patients. In response, Kohut told a mutual friend that Lou Shapiro was the only person he had ever met at the Institute who never experienced envy of his colleagues' successes, but instead offered only support and enthusiasm. Lou's lack of pretension, his sense of fairness, his frankness, and his commitment to analyzing others in a compassionate and respectful way will continue as part, not only of the “Chicago School” of psychoanalysis, but of any psychoanalytic school or perspective worthy of the name.