Ralph Romeo (“Romi”) Greenson, M.D., was a man of passions. He had many: family, friends, students, music, social causes—and psychoanalysis. As the first West Coast graduate of an analytic institute, Romi Greenson was destined to become a pioneer of psychoanalysis in Southern California, the nation, and the world.
But for Romi that world started in Brooklyn, where he grew up as one of a set of fraternal twins born to Joel and Katherine Greenschpoon. Romi's mother worked as a pharmacist while his father attended medical school. A woman of great vitality, Mrs. Greenschpoon provided a rich cultural atmosphere and promoted the children's musical education. Romi became interested in becoming a doctor by identifying with the enthusiasm of his father, a dedicated general practitioner, whom as a young child he sometimes accompanied on house calls.
Romi was educated in the Brooklyn public schools, took his pre-med work at Columbia, and then, because quotas were imposed on Jewish students in U.S. medical schools, traveled to Berne, Switzerland, to take his medical degree. This was fortuitous, as it was there he met Hildi, later to become his wife, his lifelong companion, and the mother of their two children, Daniel and Joan. It was in Berne that Romi Greenson first became enamored of psychiatry. His professor, a Swiss psychiatrist named Klaesi, though not an analyst, had an appreciation of dynamic psychiatry. In spite of his antipathy toward Americans, he immediately saw Greenson's inherent capacity for empathy, and an astute clinical sensitivity, when he had him interview a patient for the group. He is said to have remarked, “You know what I think of American students, but this one will be a psychiatrist.”
It was also in Berne that Romi had his first psychiatric training—at the Waldau, an institution for the seriously mentally ill. There, in the days before medication, he experienced firsthand the dangers of dealing with violent psychotic patients. On one occasion while on the wards, he was physically attacked by a deranged patient who, seeing him in his then fashionable raccoon coat, thought he was a bear.
Between terms in Switzerland, Romi sojourned in Los Angeles, where his brother-in-law, a physician, had secured him a summer externship at Cedars of Lebanon. Struck by the natural beauty of Southern California, he seized this opportunity to obtain a prized internship at the same hospital.
In 1935, the internship completed, Romi and Hildi, newly married, discovered to their delight that Hildi's father had bestowed a dowry on her. With their newfound fortune they returned to Europe to spend a year in Vienna, where Romi wanted to study the “new” science of psychoanalysis. Romi had been advised that Freud, now old and ill, was not accepting new trainees, but that another analyst, Wilhelm Stekel, one of Freud's original circle, was available for training. A brilliant and intuitive clinician known for making startling and sweeping interpretations without the benefit of much associative data, Stekel prided himself on making “in depth” interpretations from the manifest content of dreams. He was also fond of walking through the museums, accompanied by an entourage and tossing off dazzling psychoanalytic interpretations of the exhibits. Greenson spent nine months with Stekel and was accepted by him as one of his own. Admiring the young man's mental quickness, Stekel was fond of saying, “Greenson, you're just like me.” Stekel's method of psychoanalysis, however, was felt by many to be unique to him and therefore unteachable, an accusation he would use Greenson to refute. Describing a dream, he would call on Romi to interpret it, which he would do. Stekel would then say, “See, it can be taught. Greenson, you should get the Stekel gold medal.” It was partly from this nurturing of his imagination that Greenson developed the capacity for making startling intuitive leaps in his own clinical work.
Upon his return to Los Angeles, Greenson heard from a friend, Emanuel Lippett, that Ernst Simmel, a man with Freud's imprimatur, had formed a psychoanalytic group in the area. This was of great importance to Greenson, who had become somewhat discouraged that his patients were not “cured” in six months, as he had been taught to expect. Consequently he felt in need of additional training. This was necessary also for economic reasons, as Greenson, confident in the psychoanalytic method, had been promising his patients that if they did not get well in six months that he would treat them at no charge. As a result he was very soon seeing a lot of patients, but earning little income. In 1937 he brought his dilemma to Simmel and asked to train under him. Simmél politely declined. He said that they were being very careful who was allowed into the study group, as they did not want to waste time or be disrupted by those not in agreement with the basic Freudian concepts. In the past they had admitted some who, claiming to be psychoanalysts, were in fact charlatans. Of particular note was one man, a hairdresser named Montgomery, who had set himself up as a psychoanalyst. He had the unique habit of hiding trainees in his closet while he saw patients so that they could observe his technique. Unfortunately, Greenson's association with the renegade Stekel made him somewhat suspect. Romi did not give up, however, and in 1938 Simmel allowed him to begin training with a “new man” who had just arrived from Europe—Otto Fenichel.
Fenichel agreed to take Greenson on, but only with the proviso that he give up his analytic practice while he trained as an analyst. The financial burden that this imposed was compounded by the fact that Fenichel, though he charged sliding fees, had only an eight-dollar slot currently available. At five hours weekly, this was more than Greenson could afford. Finally, however, in August 1938, he decided to borrow money and proceed with his analysis. In those days in L.A., analysis was regarded as a revolutionary theory, somewhat akin to Marxism, and it was considered almost a badge of honor to be in debt. In fact, Romi recalled that the small group of trainees there used to boast about who owed the most money. Eventually, however, Romi ran out of money to pay his fee. Fenichel agreed to continue the analysis, be owed the money, and reduced the fee to five dollars. Greenson remembered telling him that he didn't have any personal problems, and only wanted analysis to aid him in his work. He figured that about nine months, the time he had spent with Stekel, would do the job. Four years later he finished his analysis.
After three or four months in analysis, Greenson was allowed to attend the group's meetings, which were held in the Rossmore area of downtown Los Angeles in a small house Simmel used for an office. These meetings were attended by the graduate analysts in the study group: Fenichel, Simmel, Frances Deri, Hanna Heilborn (later Fenichel), David Brunswick, and Margrit Munk. Also attending were Richard Evans, an internist, other doctors and lay people, and trainees such as Greenson, Sam Sperling, a man named Henderson, and Robert Newhouse. The next year they were
joined by Norman Rider, a trainee who later moved to San Francisco and became prominent in the society there. Later the monthly meetings were held at the School for Nursery Years, which the study group had founded. Seminars were held two to three evenings a week at Simmel's office and were open-ended, lasting as long as the participants wished. Greenson remembered a seminar taught by Fenichel in which they spent an entire year going through Freud's Three Essays word by word. There was also a literature seminar, taught by Simmel, that Greenson remembered as excellent, replete with Simmel's recollections of Freud. Simmel had a light touch, was very imaginative in his approach, and encouraged innovations in treatment as long as they were grounded in psychoanalytic principles. Another seminar, dealing with dreams, was taught by Mrs. Deri, and one on technique taught by Fenichel became the basis for his classic Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique.
After a year and a half, Greenson was allowed to take on his first control case, a woman patient who could afford nine dollars a week. For that, Greenson agreed to see her in analysis six days a week, with Simmel as his supervisor. Later he had cases supervised by Mrs. Deri and Fenichel. The paucity of training analysts at that time often made it necessary for candidates to take seminars and supervision concurrently with their own training analyst.
Greenson remembered Fenichel as a superb theoretician, methodical and systematic in his approach. He was also extremely honest and incorruptible, dedicated to his analysands but more so to analysis. “You knew his loyalty was to psychoanalysis first and secondarily to you. His goal was to provide you with the best psychoanalytic experience that he could offer.” Fenichel was also capable of being quite warm and human. Like Freud, he would occasionally tell a joke in the hour. He might also comment on his agreement or disagreement with some point Greenson had raised during a meeting the night before. Hildi Greenson recalls a humorous anecdote involving her husband's analysis with Fenichel. The night before, Simmel had announced at a meeting that Fenichel and Hanna Heilborn had just been married. Everyone was surprised and wondered what had happened to Claire Fenichel, Otto's wife up to that point. They were told that she had moved out the day before and that the newly-weds had moved into Otto's home, which served also as his office. The next day Greenson arrived for his analytic hour. He rang the bell but no one came. He knocked, but still no answer. Finally he went around the corner and telephoned from a drugstore. Fenichel answered and said, “Oh, Greenson, you can't make it today. Okay, see you tomorrow.” The next day Greenson brought this up in the analysis. Fenichel laughed uproariously, as was his custom when sharing a joke.
Hildi Greenson remembers these years as a wonderful time in Los Angeles. Despite the fact that they were all living in relative poverty, interest and enthusiasm ran high. As a spouse, she and others were very much part of the analytic scene, attending the monthly meetings and being swept along with the current of excitement over what was then a revolutionary way of approaching patients, as well as a way of looking at life itself. She recalled how candidates would stand outside on the curb after the meetings, debating and arguing for an hour or two after the seminars had officially ended. They would also continue seminars unofficially during the summer break.
During the time that Greenson was in training, and so was prohibited from practicing, he earned money by doing the occasional consultation, but more often by translating English texts for a German newspaper and by selling his blood. In his spare time he read, at the old AMA medical library in downtown Los Angeles, all the psychoanalytic literature that then existed.
Finally, in May 1942, Greenson was requested to come for an oral examination at Simmel's home. He remembered that Simmel and Fenichel talked to him for twenty minutes or so and then said that he had qualified to graduate. Since the rule then was that study groups had an official affiliation with the nearest established institute, Greenson, though he trained under the aegis of Topeka, was graduated from the San Francisco Institute, which had just then had its status approved by The American.
Upon his graduation, Greenson went into the Army Air Corps. Stationed at Yuma, Arizona, he became interested in war neuroses and the use of sodium pentothal interviews. The war years provided a great opportunity for the application of psychoanalytic knowledge to the psychiatric difficulties of returning servicemen. Once while transporting a soldier from Yuma to New York City, Greenson suffered what could have been a fatal accident when he was thrown through the windshield of his car after it skidded on an icy road. A doctor in New York tried to hospitalize him, but Greenson wanted to get back to California. Traveling by train to the West Coast, he stopped over in Chicago to visit his brother, who was also an Army physician. The latter diagnosed a skull fracture, and sought immediate medical attention for his brother. While in Chicago, Greenson recuperated at the home of the colorful psychoanalyst Lionel Blitzsten. Greenson's good friend, Leo Rosten, working as a Hollywood writer, was able to get him transferred back to L.A. temporarily, as a technical advisor on a movie he was working on. Here Greenson was able to get the medical attention he needed and was able also to work briefly in therapy with Fenichel. The injury left him permanently without a sense of smell. Greenson's Army career, incidentally, was the basis for Rosten's novel, Captain Newman, M.D., which later became a movie starring Gregory Peck in the title role.
Transferred from Yuma to Fort Logan, Colorado, Captain Greenson continued his work on war neuroses in a rehabilitation hospital established for the treatment of these conditions. There he made the acquaintance of Leo Rangell, who was also stationed there. Rangell would soon move to Los Angeles himself, where he became a major contributor to psychoanalysis. Henry Lihn, who would also come to L.A., and Lou Robbins were also part of the Fort Logan group. During Greenson's final military assignment, at Scott Field in Illinois, he met Rocco Motto and was influential in his decision to move to Los Angeles, where he became active in the psychoanalytic community.
After returning to L.A. from the Army Air Corps, Greenson was made a training analyst, the first to be designated by the original group. At that time Ernst Simmel was solely in charge of the selection of candidates and the naming of training analysts. Greenson became very active in the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and in its training program, and was highly regarded as a teacher, training analyst, and supervisor. The postwar years in L.A. were a golden time for psychoanalysis. Interest ran high. The popularization of psychoanalytic thought and its clinical applications was greatly advanced by the study and treatment of the war neuroses, and by the great influx of European analysts who had fled to the United States to escape Nazi oppression. Greenson rode the crest of this wave in the Southern California area. Dean of the training school from 1957 to 1961, he was also twice elected president of the Society.
During his active years at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute, Greenson was extremely popular as a training analyst, seminar leader, and supervisor. Mel Mandel, training and supervising analyst, past president, and past director of education at the Institute, recalls how Greenson, in one supervisory session, made an impact on him that he has never forgotten. Mandel, then a young graduate analyst, was having difficulty with the analysis of a patient referred to him by Greenson. The woman had in fact gone back to consult with Greenson due to her displeasure with the analysis. Mandel arranged a meeting with Greenson to discuss the case. Having listened to Mandel's long diatribe about feelings of frustration with various aspects of the patient's personality, Greenson simply remarked, “Have you told her these things that you are telling me?” When Mandel said no, insight became available to him: he knew he needed to find a way to use and interpret his own honest emotional reactions to the patient if the treatment was to progress and be of value. It was this sort of emotional honesty that Greenson became known for in his writing, teaching, and lecturing.
Alfred Goldberg, a training analyst, supervisor, and teacher at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute, remembers Greenson vividly. “I first met Greenson in the early fifties, just after I started my training in Los Angeles. It was just after the split. In fact, some of the candidates that went off to form the Southern California Institute still would attend our seminars… . Greenson's were the best, the most popular. He was very scholarly, always well prepared, yet never stodgy or pedantic. He had a flair, an imaginative, passionate style. He told great stories to illustrate his points. And yet he tried to follow Fenichel's very systematic, methodical way of preparation. But he was always Greenson in how he came across. There was a story he told about Fenichel. I don't know if it occurred in his analysis or his supervision, but the story goes that Greenson, being enamored of Fenichel, very much idealized him and his encyclopedic knowledge of Freud. He was beginning to try to sound like Fenichel, and it wasn't natural for him. So Fenichel stopped him and said,’ Look, it's better to be a first-rate Greenson than it is to be a second-rate Fenichel.”
Greenson was especially proud of being named a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, where he was active in teaching medical students and residents from 1957 until his death in 1979. He held many important positions in The American, including service on the Board on Professional Standards and the Committee on Institutes. In 1972 he became a Life Member.
His scientific production was prodigious, with fifty-three papers published in psychoanalytic journals. He also authored two very popular books. Explorations in Psychoanalysis, published in 1978, is a collection of thirty-two of his most popular scientific papers. His groundbreaking text in psychoanalytic theory and practice, The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis, published in 1967, has become the standard by which all other books on psychoanalytic technique will be measured. It has been translated into five languages and to date has sold more than 60,000 copies. The breadth of his interest in psychoanalytic technique is reflected in the titles of many of his scientific papers: “On the Silence and Sounds of the Analytic Hour,” “The Working Alliance and the Transference Neurosis,” “The Problems of Working Through,” “Empathy and Its Vicissitudes,” “The Use of Dream Sequences for Detecting Errors of Technique,” “The Exceptional Position of the Dream in Psychoanalytic Practice,” “The Real Relationship between the Patient and the Psychoanalyst,” “Beyond Transference and Interpretation,” “On Transitional Objects and Transference,” “Loving, Hating, and Indifference toward the Patient.”
Greenson's scientific interests were wide-ranging and anything but doctrinaire. He was bothered by the fact that analysts of different theoretical persuasions seemed to talk at each other, a situation beautifully described in his paper, “On the Origin and Fate of New Ideas.” Though he anchored his thought in the Freudian tradition, he never considered himself classical or orthodox. He preferred instead to identify with Freud's position of ever open inquiry, looking to incorporate new ideas within a framework that has stood the test of time. He viewed psychoanalysis as being far more complex than any revision or segmental emphasis of theory might indicate.
During his professional life, three major schisms occurred at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society/Institute. The first took place in the late forties and early fifties, and led to the splitting-off of some members to form the Southern California Psychoanalytic Society. The next occurred in the late sixties, when a group of “Young Turks” set about to reorganize the bylaws of the society and to change drastically the way in which the educational program of the Institute was administered. A new and radical method of appointing training analysts was established. The third rift was the “Freud-Klein Wars” of the early seventies. Greenson was deeply troubled by each of these major disruptions. In the last instance a group of twelve training analysts had secretly banded together with the intent of approaching The American and asking for status as a separate institute. Greenson had originally agreed with them, but when it came time to move formally on the proposal, he withdrew his name. “I decided that I started in the L.A. Society,” he said at the time, “and I'll die in the L.A. Society.”
It was perhaps in the public forum that Romi Greenson had his greatest impact on psychoanalysis in Southern California. While serving in the military, he had discovered that he enjoyed and had a natural gift for public speaking. Though he worked meticulously in preparaing for his lectures, Greenson had the rare ability to be able to deliver them extemporaneously. He could be intimately involved with his subject matter and with his audience at the same time. His capacity for wry, spontaneous humor kept audiences interested, and he had a gift for presenting sophisticated psychoanalytic concepts in everyday language. His public lectures—whether on radio, in temples or schools or before medical societies—created a broad audience for psychoanalytic theory and treatment in the Los Angeles area. Greenson loved psychoanalysis, and he spread the news with a passion and fervor that is not often seen.
When Romi Greenson suffered a stroke in 1974 during a pacemaker revision, he was for a time unable to speak, write, or dream. He fought valiantly back and eventually regained a good portion of his previous capacity, delivering a public lecture in San Diego in 1976, and again in 1978, for the fledgling San Diego Psychoanalytic Society.
Those fortunate to have known him as teacher, mentor, or friend will never forget him. His impact on the Los Angeles psychoanalytic scene remains vivid. It is easy to think back and in the mind's eye visualize that irascible, plucky man as he approached the lectern with strong, energetic steps, eagerly anticipating the sheer pleasure of communicating with his audience, and of unabashedly being himself.