A Conversation with Sylvia Brody

Loeb: I'd like to start by asking how you acquired your interest in psychoanalysis and child development.

Brody: In a roundabout way. As a child I used to wonder why children were so different from one another, and about how little notice most grownups took of them. Could there be an ideal way to bring up a child? I must have identified myself with children in part because I was the seventh and last child in my own family—always much smaller than everyone, and always feeling in awe of the wisdom of my six older siblings. As I had no playthings of any kind—no books, no amusements, no radio then existed, and no place to go—I spent much time watching my mother as daily and quietly she cooked, baked, cleaned, worked at the sewing machine, and kept the whole family in order, with fatigue as her only occasional complaint. Then I began to notice how my young nieces and nephews, the first of whom I acquired when I was eight years old, failed to be taken seriously by their parents.

Loeb: Did a teacher, or someone in your family, inspire or encourage your interest in children?

Brody: No, but my father influenced my predilection for learning. My mother, the first mother I observed, had a different influence. I admired her devotion to responsibility, her unusual tolerance of faults in those close to her, her sense of humor, her humility, and her love for her children, despite her having told me there were too many of us. She respected my interest, and agreed with me on its importance. And in my adolescence two of my brothers, those closest in age to me, strongly supported my intellectual pursuits, one through his passion for music, the other through his discernment in recommending books to me. But my interest in the problems of children came entirely out of my own experience.

One day when I was about ten, idly turning the pages of a women's magazine, I came upon an article entitled “Children Are People.” I was astonished. Someone in the big world outside realized it? By twelve I had determined that if I were ever in a position to do anything about it, I would try to establish a law that no one would be allowed to have a child without a license. The thought of how the law could be enforced did not occur to me. By midadolescence, I anticipated becoming a child psychologist. I would find out how best to bring up children. But I also wanted to be a writer. In fact, I set out to write a book in the first grade, but could not find a way to begin it, so I thought it not too bad to borrow the pattern of a first sentence of a story in my school reader. I have no memory of my venture after that. Soon after, I felt troubled by a dilemma: Was I to be a child psychologist or a writer? Added to that was another worry. It was one thing to know how to write, but how would I ever have any ideas to write about? Later I had a theme for a novel—betrayal. As an adult I recognized that the theme was bound up with my thoughts about the profound disappointments children can experience at the hands of their well-meaning parents. Much later I also realized that the theme of betrayal was connected with the sadness and pain of oedipal defeat.

My ambitions fell apart. Because of my parents' terminal illnesses, I had to give up the academic program in high school to learn stenography and bookkeeping in order to get a job. College was out of the question. This blow was magnified by my father's emphasis, throughout my childhood, on the value of education and scholarship. He was a Talmudic student manqué, having had to emigrate with my mother and older sister from Poland to escape conditions in the ghetto. At the Talmud Torah, the Hebrew school I had been attending, I was a dedicated student. I believe that my father wished me to carry on from where he had had to leave off. When I was five or six, he would read Talmud to me, explaining the myriad interpretations one could make of even a small passage. He told me of the great work of Maimonides. In other ways as well, he impressed me with the richness that knowledge can yield. But all such grand thinking had to be relinquished in the days of the Great Depression.

I kept on studying poetry and literary essays during all the time I could spare from homework, then job-seeking, and caring for my parents. Immersion in literature was my best recreation. With ease I memorized a great deal of poetry, as well as Emerson's essay on “Self-Reliance”—a capacity I was going to need, though I did not recognize the connection then. The pleasure I had in memorizing and analyzing poetry made me aware of the depths of emotion that may be plumbed in words, and of the precision and fluidity that may be attained in communicating ideas.

Loeb: Did you find employment as a stenographer?

Brody: As a bookkeeper for twelve dollars a week, until the man I worked for lost his business. Anyway, I had to give up looking for work to stay at home, keep house, and help nurse my parents. On days when looking for employment had become useless, I used to hide away in the New York Public Library. There, years before, I had first exulted to see books for children other than the readers we used in school. Soon I looked for books from which I might learn about the meaning of childhood. The first one I borrowed was Bertrand Russell's Education and the Good Life. Then there were a few books about progressive education in England; to my delight and amazement, their concern was the emotional life of the child—that was indeed novel. I also came across a book by Fritz Wittels, whom I later discovered was a psychoanalyst in the early part of the century. The book's title, Set the Children Free!, stirred me, as up to then all of my own education had been in overcrowded, strict, and impersonal public schools. The idea of being set free stayed with me. From the Child Study Association I learned of six elementary schools in or near New York City that were “progressive” in the best sense, and in 1935 I was selected to be an unpaid assistant teacher of five-year-olds at the Walden School, which was then in its best times. Elizabeth Goldsmith, then the school's director, had been analyzed by Ferenczi. She assured me that I did not need to go to college; that was because she placed a higher value on understanding the emotional needs of the child than on academic credentials. That kind of understanding had barely begun to exist in universities in the mid-1930s. She enlisted me partly on the basis of an essay I had written a few years before about parents' misunderstandings of their children. I can recall two ideas in it. One was that parents give drums to boys and dolls to girls, and then claim that boys are naturally more active and noisy. The other idea was about my five-year-old niece, who was chided when she persisted in looking, as if to find something, in the bottom of her mother's closet. I thought her doing so might be related, symbolically, to a wish to find out something about her mother's pregnancy. One might say that it was unrealistic for a person who had little to live on to gladly take a job without pay, but in 1935 unemployment was so pervasive that to use time in other profitable ways made sense.

In the Walden nursery school I began to understand the individuality of children and, gradually, the uses of direct observation. More than nine years of work with children and adolescents—in the second year I earned twenty-five dollars a month, and thereafter a little more—gave me an invaluable though informal education about normal growth and neurosis in children. Monthly

lectures by psychoanalysts were scheduled for the staff, a number of whom had undergone analysis—a rarity in those times. I heard Lawrence Kubie, Annie Reich, Bertram Lewin, and others of their caliber. New staff members were also given talks on infantile sexuality and unconscious conflict by another analyst, Toscan Bennett. That was how I stumbled upon psychoanalysis. With it I was able to add a mildly scientific outlook to the humanistic one I had nourished up to then.

Loeb: How did this new scientific outlook influence your life?

Brody: I wanted to learn more about myself and decided to be analyzed. By then I had heard enough about analysis to know that one should choose one's analyst carefully, and I got busy choosing. In my search I consulted eleven analysts, only three of whom fit my idea of what an analyst should be like. One, Ruth Loveland, had no immediate time free; the other two were Berta Bornstein and Theodor Reik. Reik offered me three hours a week at five dollars an hour; Bornstein, four hours at half that rate. This was 1938. I chose Bornstein in part because she worked with children, as I hoped someday to do. About thirty years later, I met Ruth Loveland socially. Smiling, I asked her if she remembered having seen me once upon a time. She smiled back and said, “Oh, yes, you interviewed me.”

Analysis propelled me to make up the high school credits required for college matriculation. When I had had to give up academic courses in favor of stenography and bookkeeping, I was told, incorrectly, that I would still be able to attend college—too bad it was a “commercial college,” as I was later dismayed to learn. There was so little chance to get personal advice in a class of nine hundred. For sixteen years then I attended night school at six different colleges, wherever I could earn the credits 1 needed. I was the only one in my family who managed to get a college education. And a year later I had a master's degree in clinical psychology. By then I had been working at the Caroline Zachry Institute of Human Development, here in New York City, with children and adolescents whose emotional problems prevented them from learning in school. That work was supervised by Bertha Tumarin, a fine child analyst trained in Latvia and probably Berlin.

I realized that to work with troubled children I needed to have exposure to patients with a range of psychopathology. So I went to Menninger for a psychological internship, encouraged in this by Ernst Kris. At Menninger I was a candidate at the Topeka Psychoanalytic Institute. I treated children and adults, counseled teachers at the Southard School, and attended grand rounds and lectures at the clinic. I was in classes with psychiatric residents and also took courses at the University of Kansas, to be credited to my doctoral degree at New York University. Then I was invited to take part in Escalona and Leitch's Infancy Research Project, with the promise that I could use some of the data for my thesis. The Project was designed to learn about normal developmental behaviors at ages 4 to 32 weeks. My particular wish was to learn about the vicissitudes of infant experience in the oral phase. At that time, in 1949, most psychological studies of infants were related to sensory and cognitive development, and to normative behaviors as measured by the infant tests of Cattell and Gesell. Psychoanalytic papers about infants—Spitz's work with institutionalized infants, and the observations of Willi Hoffer, Anna Freud, Winnicott, and a few others—had just begun to appear. But there was no systematic study, using direct observation, of the experiential events that fashion drive and ego development during the oral phase.

Loeb: So gradually your clinical focus came to include clinical research. Was that because you participated in the Infancy Research Project?

Brody: At least as important was my editorial work on the first several issues of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, and talks with Ernst Kris and Heinz Hartmann about the manuscripts. Both cared very much about the importance of direct observation and testing hypotheses—about scientific method. It was while I was observing the infants with their mothers at Menninger that I came to hypothesize—in my mind only—that the quality of an infant's experience can be known only in conjunction with knowledge about the quality of daily care given the infant by the mother or her main surrogate. Therefore, I had to examine samples of all of a mother's maternal behaviors with the infant who happened to be born to her—that is, setting aside his or her constitutional capacities, the study of which had then hardly begun—to find out which maternal behaviors mattered most. I came to find that the simplest index of a mother's maternal behavior lay in the way she handled (moved and touched) her infant at the age of 4 weeks, and in the way she fed her infant at ages 12, 20, and 28 weeks; and I found that there were important connections, more than I could have expected, among the several types of maternal behavior and the qualities of the infants' emotional development. I enlarged upon the study and its meanings in my first book, Patterns of Mothering, in 1956. Two chapters in it set a base for much of my thinking since then. One was about ego formation in infancy. The other, about unconscious fantasies of being beaten in mothers, was speculative but based on clinical experience. It helped to increase my insight into conflicts inherent in mothering. A revision of that chapter appeared in 1973. The book turned out to be a pilot study for the larger project I undertook in 1963, funded by NIMH, with a sample of 131 normal infants and their mothers, born in Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, and studied at intervals through the first year of life. The findings were dramatic, confirming in the given sample the intimate connection between maternal behavior and attitudes, and the ego development of the infants in the two groups of mothers (one that was more and one that was less adequate in their mothering). These findings were described in , published in 1970.

I probably could not have carried out this long investigation had I not had a background of clinical experience with infants, children, and parents. And there was one other long-ago but fundamental source of my concern with direct observation and research. That was my reading, in late adolescence, of Thomas Huxley's essay, “On a Piece of Chalk.” The essay is an exquisite model of minute observation of tiny fossilized marine organisms dated from ancient times, to be found in the white chalky cliffs of Dover and other coastal sections of England. It tells the story that those organisms contain about our physical and chemical world. Huxley composed the essay as an address to workingmen, to whom he liked to give lectures on scientific subjects. My first introduction to the use of scientific method, it deepened my commitment to the study of evolution—not of geological phenomena, which hold their own fascination, but of behavior, conflict, and character from infancy onward.

Loeb: You have not said anything about your many other publications.

Brody: My favorite book is Passivity, which started out as a “brief communication” about two preadolescent boys who reported hypnogogic experiences. I've also written papers on child and adolescent analysis, fathers' behavior and attitudes, disturbances in the first year of life, child psychotherapy, transitional objects, attachment and bonding, and a critical appraisal of theories of infant development and its disturbances; and I've made seven teaching films about mother-infant and mother-child interaction. At present my main interest is in the sources of later psychopathology in infancy and early childhood.

Loeb: Thank you. This has been a real learning experience. We look forward to your next publication.