From the time of his arrival in Los Angeles, Leo Rangell has been engaged in a constant outpouring of psychoanalytic writing. He has authored more than 350 scientific papers and several books. His The Mind of Watergate deals with the moral crises that came to light during the era of Vietnam and Watergate. To describe the dynamic forces underlying the events of these times, he coined the phrase “the syndrome of the compromise of integrity.” His two-volume collection, The Human Core, contains 35 of his most important papers. In addition, he has turned his considerable administrative talents to serving three terms as President of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, and two terms each as President of The American and the International Psychoanalytical Association.
Wilson: We were talking earlier about the social psychoanalytic climate in Los Angeles today, as compared to the past.
Rangell: Yes, I was just saying, Sam, that the two of us could be living in Europe and Los Angeles and meet as little as we do now, and we are two people who would like to see each other. I hit some kind of nerve, because you acknowledged that and wondered why it was so. I was wondering whether it's just I who feel that way, or my generation, but I don't think it's that. I have a feeling that in 1990 the atmosphere in Los Angeles psychoanalysis is not what it was twenty to thirty years ago with regard to the spirit, the energy, the friendship factor, the social life, the joy of being in a common enterprise, sharing not only a means of livelihood but a way of life.
Wilson: That's how it was when you first came here?
Rangell: Yes. It's very different now. Today there are a series of isolated units. There are regular professional meetings, but nothing like twenty years ago. I have no incentive to go now.
Wilson: That was something I wanted to bring up. When one goes to the scientific meetings now it seems that there are very few of our members there. Mainly you see people from outside the Society, allied professionals. This is very different from how it was in the late sixties.
Rangell: The late sixties and early seventies, that's a very crucial time. That's exactly when the change took place. Before that I'd never miss a meeting. I'd look forward to it the whole month. I just gave a talk locally and I don't know if any analysts from the L.A. Society were there.
Wilson: You date the change to have occurred around the late sixties, early seventies. Did it have anything to do with the reorganization of the institute at that time?
Rangell: No, the reorganization itself came about from an emotional social scientific rebellion. There was an overthrow of both good and bad leaders. People worked for many years trying to make a better organization and milieu. But the result has not been very salutary.
Wilson: You called it a “social scientific rebellion.” It wasn't just one or the other?
Rangell: I have said in recent talks that to really understand the history of psychoanalysis and its undulations, it's insufficient to look at the scientific issues apart from the sociological, political, and interpersonal elements. In that respect it has struck me that we've always been very inhibited in becoming ad hominem (and ad feminam) in discussions of scientific-political history. In omitting those factors, we leave out half the history of every institute in the country.
Wilson: Could you say anything about the climate in Los Angeles and Southern California that might have led to the kind of disruption that occurred in the middle to late sixties? Are there any specific difficulties in practicing psychoanalysis that are significantly different from those encountered elsewhere?
Rangell: Southern California has always been more exciting and more disturbing than any other place I know. Perhaps the two go together. Ordinarily a disturbed excitement should make for a very creative place. But places that are creative can become deserts when things go wrong. And things have gone wrong with us. Perhaps there will be a renaissance, but I don't see it in the immediate future.
Wilson: Do you see much that is of value in the various innovations now current in theory and technique?
Rangell: In most instances you have simply the rediscovery of the wheel. Things we've known for five, ten, twenty, even forty years are presented with great fanfare, as if more modern and liberal elements were required for their discovery. Take the idea that there are innate factors between mother and child and between peers or friends. I wrote a paper on friendship thirty years ago. It's still the only paper on friendship in the psychoanalytic literature. And now we think we've moved from a drive theory to an object relations theory. That paper, on the most common of all object relations, was written at the height of the drive-defense, structural, ego type of thinking, in which I still believe. Despite this, and despite many other instances that could be cited, many would-be innovators insist they've discovered object relations or the preoedipal period, which of course were always intrinsic to our teaching.
Wilson: Was this interest in object relations the scientific aspect of the scientific political revolution that occurred in the late sixties in L.A.? Did people became interested in object relations to the exclusion of the rest of analytic theory?
Rangell: The interest in object relations is not the source of the troubles so much as it is a compromise arising out of them. It was the way out for many people. Analysts who today don't want to discard classical theory and who are unhappy at the stridency of the new theories of self, intersubjectivity, empathy, and total immersion try to retain both by being more object related. So object relations wasn't the wedge that started the division. It was a compromise, very much like the middle group in London who attempt a compromise between the Kleinians and the Anna Freudians. But to my way of thinking they don't succeed. Some are more or less Kleinian, while others retain or revert to classical ideas. Some fail to include the classical position in their compromise at all; they simply give it up. Unfortunately, that's becoming the model worldwide. I think many things originated in England, moved to Europe, South America, even Australia, and more recently came to America. I regret that American psychoanalysis has become so submissive in the face of international divisiveness and separatism.
“New ways of thinking have advanced the periphery while retaining the center. It's when peripheral advances give up the center that … schisms threaten.”
Rangell: No, But I had an image of California, gleaned from a family member, that drew me here. Getting into the Army was my ticket to leave New York. During the Army, I arranged an assignment in Santa Ana, and that's when I saw this place for the first time. I decided to come a few months later. I bought a house here while I was still in uniform. I knew of Fenichel during my residency in New York in 1940. My residency years were 1939, 1940, and 1941. We had residencies then of a year each rather than a single three-year residency. We felt that that was the best preparation, to go to three different hospitals. I had a residency in neurology, in acute psychiatry, and long-term psychiatry. My residency in acute psychiatry took place in a hospital like Bellevue called Grasslands, in Westchester County. Then I went to the New York Psychiatric Institute at Columbia, where we did psychotherapy for the whole year with a few patients. There I began to learn depth therapy, which was completely analytic. When I was a neurologist, my residency group were all young, bright New York intellects who had started out wanting to study the nervous system and then realized the important part of the nervous system was the psychic system.
Wilson: So, like Freud, you came to psychiatry through neurology.
Rangell: I followed the path of Freud. I was going to go from neurology to neurophysiology to neurosurgery. During my residency in neurology, two close friends were Jack Arlow and Victor Rosen. Vic was my roommate. We started to analyze dreams instead of looking at neurones. The year I was at Grasslands, my chief resident was in analytic training at the New York Institute and brought the Psychoanalytic Quarterly to the hospital. I looked through it and saw papers by Fenichel which later became chapters in his textbook. Fenichel became psychoanalysis to me. I had looked at The Interpretation of Dreams and couldn't make my way through it. But Fenichel's clinical vignettes captured my interest. Then I met him in the Army, when he came to an Air Force post to visit Greenson, whom I had also met.
Wilson: Was that in Arizona?
Rangell: No, Denver. Greenson had been a student of Fenichel's at the L.A. Institute. Fenichel and Hanna came to Denver to visit him there.
Wilson: So you and Greenson were working together?
Rangell: We were teaching psychodynamics to flight surgeons. We were also giving sodium pentothal to returned prisoners of war to treat their traumatic neuroses. Fenichel heard about this and wanted to see it for himself. He was the most open-minded, ebullient, enthusiastic guy, with a loud raucous laugh. I was very honored that after only a day or two of our acquaintance he put me down to be analyzed by him in L.A. He was going to continue the training I had interrupted in New York. That was in the fall of 1945. By the time I got here in June of 1946 he had died. And I knew Simmel for only a year and a half, until he died in November 1947.
Wilson: What I keep coming back to is this: Is there something about this place that specifically lends itself to such problems?
Rangell: Two words very prominent in my writings are “similarities” and “differences.” There are also in these issues similarities and differences, between L.A. and New York, London, Chicago, Frankfurt, or Sydney, Australia. The similarities are the human makeup. The title of my two-volume collection is The Human Core. This refers to what is common to all human beings. There are also differences. The very thing that brought me and so many others to L.A. after the war was the climate. Not only the weather, but also the emotional and intellectual climate. We quickly became the most important society outside the East Coast because this was an attractive place. It's also not accidental that this is Tinseltown—the movie capital, the excitement capital. With the glories of the climate comes the excitement of the beautiful, thrilling people, people who make great analytic patients. There was always a great rivalry for patients. The point is that this is a place of exciting people and with it comes great ambition, visibility, exhibitionism, cultism, factionalism, exciting ideas—and eccentric ideas.
Wilson: Would it have been the same for you in New York?
Rangell: Why did I stay? My wife and I often ask ourselves that question. We brought up a family here. I've been here almost fifty years. We often ask would life have been different for us if we had stayed in New York. My closest analytic colleagues were always in New York. My close friends and colleagues out here weren't the people who stimulated me the most scientifically, or when I wrote. I usually wrote alone. In New York I might have collaborated more. But maybe this way was better.
Wilson: I guess you and Greenson were the main people in L.A. who wrote significantly.
Rangell: In terms of the main psychoanalytic body, you're right, it was mainly Greenson and I. And that I must say was a very important relationship. I won't go into it much, but it had as much to do with my staying here as with my difficulties here.
Wilson: I don't know all the details, but did you feel that you were debating each other in a way that was productive?
Rangell: No. We were colleagues, and helpful to each other in a way, and stimulating to each other. We never debated analytically, but I don't think we were on opposite sides of any theoretical debate. Strangely, I had an affinity theoretically with Greenson, and he with me. In terms of personality, there was a great difference. There was criticism of him by me and of me by him, but it was behind the scenes.
“I favor what I call ‘total composite psychoanalytic theory,’ which is different from electicism.”
Wilson: In your “The Future of Psychoanalysis,” which appeared in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, you wrote that mainstream psychoanalysis is no longer main. Your statement that we need to clarify the limits of what is to be considered psychoanalytic is integral to a problem our candidates face with regard to certification. One of the issues that disturbs candidates is how they can know that what they're doing is acceptable to those who judge their work.
Rangell: That's two different subjects. One is scientific and the other administrative, although the two need to be integrated. I said that my view of psychoanalysis is no longer the mainstream. I say that regretfully. Twenty-five years ago, psychoanalysis was in the mainstream and nonanalytic thinking was less prestigious, less convincing, less acceptable to the larger mental health field. Now total psychoanalytic theory, as I see it, is so surrounded by nonanalytic ways of thinking that my view is in the minority. Regarding certification, The American has wavered in recent years as to what is basic and enduring and indispensable, and therefore students who are trained in eclecticism don't know whether their training is acceptable. The American hasn't been uniform or consistent enough, which is why the local groups are confused. They don't know what to adhere to. Should they adhere to eclectic training in which, for example, a patient can be seen as having an early, oral breast envy problem, as used to be emphasized here during the Kleinian days? What of the fact that for five years we heard that, and now it's gone? Do its onetime adherents say, “We were wrong; go back to oedipal,” or do they say, “We're still right, but we don't talk about it”?
Wilson: I think that people get caught up in the political aspects of all that. It's a very complicated, multi-determined issue.
Rangell: Yes, I know. But the political has to be secondary to the theoretical and scientific. Instead, though, the science becomes handmaiden to the politics.
Wilson: In that same article in the Quarterly, you talk about Wallerstein and his idea of a multiplicity of abstract theories united by a clinical theory common to all. I suppose that is another approach to the issues surrounding theoretical diversity.
Rangell: I think what's common about the clinical is the material. From that, clinical theories are as divided as more abstract theories. The understanding of clinical material divides theoretical groups, which are then not united. That was proven in many studies, including one by the Fines, who took four different schools and showed four different ways of thinking about the same clinical material.
Wilson:
Wilson: So you don't see splitting and schisms as a specifically American phenomenon?
Rangell: I think it's become an American phenomenon since 1970. Before that, America was more unified. The IPA was characteristically more admissive of divergent theories because it had to encompass many different areas and ways of thinking. Not all ideas, however, were acceptable. They did have objections to Lacanian theory. I've often asked how they could leave the Jungians out so definitively and yet not assert the right to assess other theories as to whether they fulfill the criteria of psychoanalysis.
Wilson: That's an interesting question. I was just reading Strachey's introduction to “On Narcissism,” and he says that one of Freud's motives for writing it was to refute Adler and Jung. That's getting back to the ad hominem issue you mentioned before.
Rangell: Freud had this problem from the beginning. The history of psychoanalysis has gone through different phases with regard to separations, and the acceptability of old and new ways of thinking. It was always a question whether those with differences were sufficiently adherent to the indispensable elements of psychoanalysis, or whether they had given up necessary ingredients, as did Jung. When he
substituted elan vital for sexual energy he stepped beyond the pale of psychoanalytic scientific theory. It's now almost a hundred years later and theory has become much more disparate. New ways of thinking have advanced the periphery while retaining the center. It's when peripheral advances give up the center that dilemmas arise and schisms threaten. For example, Young-Bruehl quotes Anna Freud as saying that while she accepted Kohut's earlier work, she considered his post-1977 revisions “antipsychoanalytic.” Today it's impolitic to say such a thing.
Wilson: Do you have any analytic insight into why this move away from the center occurs?
Rangell: I think that psychoanalytic concepts are exposed, repressed, exposed again, and repressed again. There's a pendular movement of psychoanalytic insight. Ideally, psychoanalysis analyzes the need to be loved so that it can be fulfilled in rational, nonneurotic ways. But I think that the need to be loved battles the need for insight, in the group as in a patient. I think that the need to be admired, recognized, and appreciated is as much a part of the analyst as of any other human being, and that in group life it works as an antagonistic force against the continual pursuit of insight, with all its exposure of unconscious mechanisms. Humanistic motives are stronger and easier to defend in a group than are analytic ones.
Wilson: Is it assumed that the two are in opposition?
Rangell: Too often the fallacy is to make a dichotomy or polarity of what is a continuity. Psychoanalysis is a humanistic discipline. It has a very specific humanistic function to perform, that of providing the possibility of autonomy for a disturbed, suffering human being. That is as necessary as the achievement and maintenance of human rights. That is not contrary to the psychoanalytic goals of insight and autonomy. But I think that historically the two struggle against each other. This leads to a group divisiveness that has hindered the acceptance and development of psychoanalytic theory.
Wilson: When you first came to L.A., was there more of a unified view than now exists?
Rangell: When I came here things were just beginning. Fenichel and Simmel had come in the thirties. I came in 1946 from the Army. I had met Fenichel before I got here, while I was still in uniform, but by the time I settled here permanently he had died. I had been in New York before the Army, but I had my eye on L.A. Knowing that Fenichel was out here was like Freud being here. To this day he is for me a clinical and theoretical exemplar. I always think that my writing takes off from his.
Wilson: He's not talked about much these days, although his two books are still quite well known.
Rangell: Those two books remain for me the basic ones. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis is the main textbook on the why and how of behavior. The slim volume on technique was the subject of one of the first Classics Revisited panels of The American. There were two discussants, Merton Gill and I. I praised the book, but to my surprise Gill criticized Fenichel for emphasizing defense rather than transference. I pointed out that defense or resistance is the first item to be dealt with, and that if it involves transference, then transference should be the subject of that particular moment of interpretation. Defense before content, Fenichel's first rule, holds as true today as when Freud first described the role of resistances. You can't get to the depth without the surface being gently interpreted out of the way. But to return to your question, psychoanalysis at the time I arrived was as golden as the Southern California sun. I came here, I must admit, partly because this was the place of sun, beach, and tennis. I was a young nature lover, and Southern California was a dream.
Wilson: Had you been out here before?
Wilson: Were San Francisco and Los Angeles forming at about the same time?
Rangell: San Francisco was a bit ahead of us. Though there was a split here, the two local groups were friendly at the West Coast meetings. When we went to San Francisco together we were all great comrades. When we came back there were two separate groups.
Wilson: What was the basis for the separation?
Rangell: In a retrospective way I'd say that the split and all such differences are based on a combination of theories and people. In the old days they used to say the split was purely theoretical, but in an interview in TAP a year or two ago (25/2), someone said that the split was due only to personalities. It is always both. Scientifically, the split was due to theoretical differences between Fenichel and Alexander. It was due also to a disharmony between the people who adhered to the different theories and who were working out their own personal differences on the basis of their allegiances to Fenichel or Alexander. The fact that the splits were not based on rational, overt grounds is attested by the fact that the L.A. group was in favor of lay
analysis, while the original name of the other group was the Society for Psychoanalytic Medicine of Southern California. Now, historically, you may realize that very quietly some years later they dropped the “medical” when it became propitious to recruit a group of lay people, such as academics at UCLA, without any acknowledgment that it was wrong to have split on that account. Ironically, the Southern California Society became more active than L.A. in admitting lay analysts, even granting a Ph.D., which L.A. never did.
Wilson: They came full circle, then. But wasn't another point of contention Alexander's idea of the corrective emotional experience?
Rangell: That was the theoretical part. Another irony is that today it's theoretical diversity that unites the two groups. Klein, Bion, Fairbairn, Kohut, and Stolorow united the two groups where classical psychoanalysis failed to. Through all this I have my own theory. I accept new developments that are valid as quickly as anyone. But I do not throw out drive theory, the Oedipus complex, or defenses. I certainly include empathy, but I don't substitute it for objectivity or scientific neutrality. I favor what I call “total composite psychoanalytic theory,” which is different from eclecticism. The Kleinian school, which sparked the major change in this area, was first invited to Los Angeles from England by one member, and then a few others, beginning in 1969. As a small unit outside the Institute, they invited speakers, supervisors, teachers, and leaders, creating a great social whirl and enjoying considerable professional popularity.
Wilson: You say that people were brought over and things were done outside the Institute. Do you think it would have been better if the new ideas were kept within the aegis of the Institute and talked about and debated within that framework?
Rangell: In former times, it was possible to conduct direct, scientific, nonpersonalized discussions, even confrontations, in a useful and interesting way. But the capacity to discuss controversial points without acrimony seems to have been lost. I plead guilty to that myself. I don't go to meetings anymore, because I can't sit there without openly saying my piece, and I don't feel free or courageous enough to do that. The audience is often either sullen or angry or rejecting. Those who agree with you are afraid to say so. I've seen this at the highest level, both nationally and internationally, but nothing like L.A. I'm constantly presenting my work elsewhere, but not here. In former times, every paper I wrote was given first to the L.A. Society, to interested audiences. There would be social events before and after the presentation. Then came envy and resentment. The envy was so strong that instead of being acknowledged and understood it became the subject of the next theory. Kleinian theory, which emphasized envy, became a smokescreen that obscured issues of sibling rivalry. Now what you have is a relatively young mental health professional group, hundreds of them, eagerly seeking information and taking notes when someone like me gives a talk. Often they are too shy and inexperienced to feel free enough to engage me in dialogue. And those who are my peers ask why I don't cast my subject in terms of the self instead of the id and the ego, taking for granted that they have proven their way is better.
Wilson: So scientifically you feel that you and Greenson were pretty close theoretically. Also, you both had this strong interest in Fenichel.
Rangell: Scientifically we had a common ground. We didn't have a rivalry about Fenichel because I had no claim on him. I didn't know Fenichel except for one meeting. Greenson was analyzed by him. So there was no rivalry about that. In fact, I'll tell you an interesting anecdote. When I was asked to be on that Classics Revisited panel, I wrote a paper on Fenichel's volume on technique. By that time Greenson and I were not speaking to each other because of a longstanding situation. Someone gave him my manuscript, which was private and confidential, and he called me late one night. We hadn't spoken for a long time. I know he was already ill because he had a sort of dysarthria. I picked up the phone, and he said, “Leo, this is Romi. I want to tell you that I just read your paper on Fenichel.” I said, “The paper I'm giving in New York?”. He said yes, and I asked him how he got it. He said, “Don't ask me that. I got the paper and I read it. I'm calling to tell you that it was absolutely great, the best thing I've ever read. Goddammit! You hit it on the nose!” And he hung up. I was surprised that he did a thing like that. But when it came to other things, paper after paper, there was a great rivalry and a feeling of mutual nonappreciation and unfairness to each other. I never thought he was fair to me, and he must have thought I was a thorn in his side. If we had remained friends, things here might have been different. A few years ago Martin Azarian, of IUP said to me, “Leo, you know we have a great textbook among our publications, Greenson's Volume I. Would you like to write Volume II?” I said, “What?” He said, “Yes, would you like to write Greenson's Volume II?” I couldn't believe he was asking me to do that. I said, “Martin, are you serious?” And he said, “Of course, you're the logical one to do it.” I said I couldn't do it; I was surprised he was
even asking me. You know, that would have been a great thing if I could have come up with Greenson's Volume II. It would have meant a lot to me, and probably to his family, but I couldn't do it. I wrote my own papers instead. That would have been something, for me to amend Greenson, and to add to it my own scientific values and preferences.
Wilson: During my training at the L.A. Institute I had a course with Greenson, but I don't think you taught there during those years.
Rangell: During the seventies, I resigned from the L.A. Society and Institute. I was intensely opposed to the turn of events, not only to the content but the tone and motivations, and as a matter of principle severed my affiliation. I later came back as an honorary member. Because of the events of those years the training of an entire generation suffered. Lately, however, three or four of the local groups have asked me to guest lecture on ego psychology, drives, and structural theory, because they hardly get any of that in their curricula. When I taught one of the groups the other evening, they were on guard at first because it was like inviting the enemy. But they found out the enemy was nice. We had a pleasant evening. How far it goes after that I don't know.
Wilson: What do you think the effect is going to be of the International's approving institutes without their having to be members of The American?
Rangell: The administrative agreements between The American and the International were necessary and helpful, but I don't think that the core issue of psychoanalysis has been resolved by these arrangements. The core issue that will unite or divide the psychoanalytic world is a decision about the degree of diversity that is acceptable and desirable in psychoanalytic theory. I think we have to preserve the scientific right to say what is and what is not psychoanalysis.
Wilson: Do you think we need more hard data in order to make that decision?
Rangell: The hard data question is another scientific issue. Hard data about what? I don't think it is hard data about outcome that will decide, because you can get good outcomes with bad theories and bad outcomes with good theories. So I don't think you can go by who cures more. The question is whether emotional factors can be quantified. Can you measure degrees of anxiety or depression, or determine efficacy on the basis of measurements of affective content? I don't think that microscopic work—sentence by sentence, word for word—is the answer. I don't think that hard data, in terms of measuring cognitive or affective expressions in the analytic hour, will tell us very much. I think it always boils down to the affective fit and the “aha” phenomenon between analyst and patient. This has to be convincing, but it's not hard data in the sense of the physical sciences. We cannot emulate or duplicate the physical sciences. I don't mind people trying to do that, but I don't debate endlessly with them or jump on that bandwagon. I like to compare it with clinical research. That has been my lifelong work. I'm a researcher as a clinician. I've been a thorough clinician. I never reduced my full-time practice, even through four presidencies nationally and internationally. The rock-bottom data comes from the couch, from the psychoanalytic method. A method based on empathy doesn't produce the data that the method of analytic neutrality does. The truest data are produced by free association occurring in a setting where the patient is not intimidated by the analyst and finds the analyst nonjudgmental, nonmoralizing, but still a moral person. This has been an area of great scientific interest to me, the moral conflicts that produce neurosis. This takes the most relentless pursuit, the greatest incorruptibility on the part of the analyst. It takes a lot out of you, year after year, decade after decade. It wears you down, but it's the life of the psychoanalyst, as distinct from the life of the supportive psychotherapist.
Rangell: Yes, but I end on an upbeat. That is that patients will demand better things from us, and candidates will demand better things from our institutes, than the fragmentation of theories gives them. They want to go back to scientific thinking. Candidates know what they've missed. This is more than wanting to be accredited by The American. They have become aware of deficiencies in their training and curriculum. They want more science. And so do patients. They like to be treated analytically, even though they try to seduce you. I ended on an upbeat because I wanted to show that I'm not totally pessimistic. People ask me if Freud was a pessimist. I reply that he was neither an optimist nor a pessimist but a realist. One of my thrusts through all of this is that I don't think we're facing the right issues. I don't think we're facing the issue of what we consider psychoanalysis to be and what we should teach. It's not a question of who we should certify. Who we are going to certify follows from what we are going to teach. We should consider the possibility that the present trend is for The American to be too loose, a far cry from the usual complaint that it is too rigid.
Wilson: I'm sure that greater clarity as to the criteria would go a long way toward helping us all. Thank you very much for your time and for your thoughts.