By sheer coincidence, John Gedo was invited to deliver a plenary address at the December meetings just as he completed thirty years in The American and became a life member. In a recent conversation he reflected that it has been a particularly significant three decades, beyond any personal meaning for him, as it has seen a thoroughgoing revolution in The American and in the discipline of psychoanalysis. People are so preoccupied by the fact that the public image of analysis has been eroded, he feels, that they tend to neglect the more important fact that within the discipline, and from the standpoint of scientific progress, things have greatly improved.
A generation ago the situation within The American was rather typical of an immature discipline, he noted, making it clear that this was not meant pejoratively. According to sociologists of science, he pointed out, an immature science is one in which the rules are still evolving and people must commit with a great deal of faith. They join up because they have a prejudice that this is the wave of the future. Because the kind of solid information is lacking that a mature science has at its disposal, internal relations within the field are based on authority and charisma. The American has been severely criticized for that, though unjustly in Gedo's opinion, as things could not have been otherwise. At the time he joined, psychoanalysis had been in existence only seventy years, and only about fifty as an organized science. Today, a generation later, psychoanalysis more closely resembles the mature sciences. Not that factors of authority and charisma do not operate; these are normal, he believes, but they are greatly diminished, as is evident in the very fact that he has been invited to give a plenary. Only now, he feels, is the organization ready to hear and promote eccentric voices out of the mainstream.
Even fifteen years ago it was very different: the profession then consisted of a few leaders and a crowd of followers. Gedo still sees a bit of that, but most of the charismatic leaders, figures like Kohut and Loewald, are now dead. Insofar as people need leaders to look up to, they now focus on figures from the past. A good example is the tremendous interest now shown in the work of Winnicott and Ferenczi, who even fifteen years ago, around the time Winnicott died, enjoyed nothing like the reputation they bask in today. With charisma no longer the order of the day, it is Ferenczi's ideas, not his personal traits, that have appeal, while in fact his personality is exposed to public view in a way that can inspire only pity.
Gedo could not comment on the quality of candidates today because he has been out of touch with them the past few years. When he applied for training over forty years ago, it was a vintage year, partly because of the backlog created by World War II. These are the analysts whose careers are now coming to a close, but whose work produced many changes for the better. These were the leaders, as well as those who concentrated more on scientific work. The person whose career Gedo considers most similar to his own, Arnold Modell, was not terribly involved in administrative matters or leadership in The American, but has been very productive and commands respect throughout the organization. His is a kind of ecumenical position—everyone takes what he says seriously enough to think about it.
Recently Gedo has completed a revision of Beyond Interpretation, the 1979 work in which he articulated the core of his original ideas. The revision shows a major difference from works produced by the previous generation. Gedo's clinical convictions have evolved as a result of his own work and from listening to colleagues, but perhaps more so through his attention to recent developments in neurophysiology, infant research, and cognitive psychology. Psychoanalysis was slow to listen to these disciplines, he feels, and indeed they said little that was meaningful to analysts. It is now possible, however, for them to engage in research projects of direct relevance to psychoanalysis, and they are doing so, in part because analysts are interested. Emde and Greenspan are the prototypes here, interdisciplinary researchers with a foot in both camps. In the previous generation there were people who attempted this kind of work, people like Mahler and Spitz, but they were too committed to the assumptions of psychoanalysis to keep their work from in the end being largely circular. They did not test psychoanalysis on the basis of independent evidence.
Currently Gedo is working on the second draft of a manuscript on the creative personality. An earlier work, a collaboration with his wife Mary for the monograph series of Creativity Research Journal, touched on these matters; it was a primer on the method of psychological biography. The new book also has a foot in both camps, the creativity research as well as psychoanalysis. Written to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible, the book focuses on what psychoanalysis can contribute to the question of creativity, though from a somewhat different perspective than is customary. Where usually the predominant question is the motive force of creativity, Gedo essentially disregards that issue, asking instead what kind of personality is capable of it. He seeks commonalities across different kinds of creativity, as well as differences in terms of the requirements posed by separate fields of endeavor.
Looking to the future, Gedo is now in the process of finishing up his clinical responsibilities. He will soon join Jacob Arlow, whom he greatly admires, as the only analyst Gedo knows who has retired from clinical work while still in his analytic prime. Like Arlow, he plans to continue writing and speaking.
For his plenary address Gedo will present a comprehensive theoretical position, which he hopes to demonstrate was implicit in Freud's all along. The basic idea is concentrated in the metaphor of “working through,” and the plenary will deal in operational terms with the meaning of that phrase.
At conversation's end, Gedo, in his usual style, had a recommendation for The American. “Given the organization's foreign policy problems and our relative health as a scientific discipline,” he advised, “we should turn inward instead of stressing outreach, with everything that implies. Instead of expansion and recruitment, we should welcome the challenge of a time when only those who really love psychoanalytic activity will want to become analysts. There will be no secondary gain to it. We should improve quality and raise standards. I have been saying this for twenty years, ever since I got some notion of how things are all over the country. We have been pursuing insensate imperialist policies. Instead of spreading the psychoanalytic empire, we should make sure that the homeland is thriving. In addition to others I may have mentioned, I am a great admirer of William Gladstone, who believed in ‘Little England.’”