For over four decades L. Bryce Boyer has been a major contributor to psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. His accomplishments, however, are not limited to psychoanalysis. By pioneering cross-cultural use of the Rorschach test, he has also made significant contributions to anthropology and psychological testing. Among the very first investigators in ethnopsychoanalysis—the systematic use of psychoanalytic principles in anthropological fieldwork—he was preceded in that field only by Roheim and Devereux.
An early proponent of psychoanalysis in the treatment of regressed patients, Boyer began practicing in Berkeley, California, having graduated from the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. Because the local analytic community was hostile to the idea of analyzing regressed patients, however, his work was held in high esteem internationally for almost thirty years before any comparable interest developed in the Bay Area.
In his work with these patients, Boyer developed a number of ideas applicable to psychoanalysis more generally. He was among the first to use psychoanalysis, without modifications in technique, in the treatment of patients who are schizophrenic or borderline, or who have severe character pathology. In the early 1950s, he and Enrique Racker of Argentina realized independently that inadequate analysis of counter-transference is often the major obstacle to successful treatment in these cases. Early on, Boyer advised against making oedipal-level interpretations before the material is interpreted and worked through dyadically. His recognition of the interdependence of transference and countertransference led him to advocate the use of countertransference reactions—the analysts thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations—in understanding the transference-countertransference constellation. This position is fully explored in his richly evocative paper, “Roles Played by Music during Countertransference Facilitated Transference Regression,” which was published in the International Journal of Psycho- Analysis.
A recent development in Buyer's thinking is his idea that when a treatment is working well a state of “reverie” can be achieved in which the analyst is particularly receptive to the unconscious currents in the transference-countertransference constellation. He calls this “controlled complementary regression” on the part of the analyst—a psychological technique analogous to the squiggle game described by Winnicott. The technique is an associational analogue to drawing, in which analyst and patient associate in turn, each to the other's comments.
As an avid proponent of regression in analysis, particularly with disturbed patients, Boyer considers it imperative that the treatment frame be tightly adhered to if the regression is to be contained, and acting out and/or in kept to a minimum. A major reason for treatment impasses and failures, he believes, is inadequate analysis of the negative transference, which many analysts manage to avoid through the invocation of parameters. Since unintegrated anger is an extremely important part of the disturbed patient's problem, the frame must be maintained to contain this affect and allow its elaboration. Since Boyer believes that interpretation is supportive of the ego's integrity, he insists on conveying an understanding of the patient, to the patient, in words. Verbal symbols, Boyer maintains, are indispensable to structural change.
This concern with language he traces to a boyhood spent in Utah with a psychologically disturbed mother. “My mother's distortions,” he recalls, “led to my distrust of the oral and written word from a tender age and to a profound need to learn for myself, empirically.” His interest in the meaning of symbols, his sensitivity to potential violence and how to avoid it, and his interest in the regressed patient came out of his relationship with his mother. In latency he cut school very frequently and studied ornithology, botany, and other aspects of nature in nearby mountain canyons. He spent many days at the city library, reading “indiscriminately.”
He dates his interest in anthropology to summers spent with his maternal grandparents, who farmed on the edge of an Indian reservation. He “was awed by the Indians' costumes and their majestic behavior during parades and ritual performances, and at other times was appalled by their treatment by Anglos,” among them his mothers mother. This childhood and adolescent fascination led eventually to anthropological research among the Mescalero, Lipan, and Chiricahua Apaches with his wife, Ruth Boyer, a cultural anthropologist. Their main single study, pursued continuously since 1957, has focused on the influences on one another of the Apachean social structure, child rearing patterns, and personality organization. Boyer's main source of personality structure data came from his practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapy in an office provided by the tribe, at one time for fourteen continuous months. His clinical work, focusing on resistance and transference, proved to be very beneficial to the Apaches, relieving them of nightmares, phobias, psychosomatic disorders, marital problems, and alcoholism. Parenthetically, such psychotherapeutic practice with the Apaches later made his technical work much better with the seriously disturbed patients he saw in his private practice. Most intriguingly, since the Apaches believe that anyone interested in psychology must be a shaman, he has been accorded that status, a position unique among psychoanalysts. Unfortunately, because shamans can practice both good and bad magic, one of the first requests he received was to use his magic to kill someone. As it turned out, the intended victim died soon after the request was made, rendering the psychoanalyst, in the eyes of the Apaches, an extremely powerful shaman.
The Boyers have done fieldwork also in the highlands of Peru, with the Upper Tanana and Tanaina Indians and the Yukon Delta Eskimos in Alaska; and with the Laplanders of northern Finland.
There is an exceptional quality about Boyer that captures people's imagination. He tells a story of how, by “sheer luck,” he gained admittance to Stanford and later its medical school. Even as a young boy he was determined to be a doctor. Later, during the lean depression years, he attended Marin Junior College while hoping to go on to Stanford, considered a most prestigious university in his native Utah but well beyond his means. Only reluctantly did he register at Berkeley for the remainder of his undergraduate work. Then one day, when he was hitchhiking from Kentfield to San Francisco, a woman picked him up and asked him why he was so glum. When he told her of his frustrated desire to attend Stanford Medical School, she said she was on her way to pick up her son and offered to “show him around the campus.” That very day she facilitated his
admittance to Stanford, found him a job to pay for his board and room, and helped to arrange the necessary scholarship.
Since then, Boyer's accomplishments have been many. They include the highest honors bestowed by the psychoanalytic societies of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, the George Devereux Prize, and the J. Elliott Royer award of the University of California. In 1979 he gave the Fifth Memorial Melitta Sperling Lecture, and in 1985 the Society for Psychological Anthropology, a division of the American Anthropological Association, established the L. Bryce Boyer Prize for Psychoanalytic Anthropology. Boyer's books and articles number in the hundreds and have been translated into German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Finnish, and Norwegian. He has been coeditor of The Psychoanalytic Study of Society since 1976, codirector of the Center for the Advanced Study of the Psychoses since 1981, director of the Boyer Research Institute for study on clinical and cross-cultural applications of the Rorschach since 1977, a supervising psychoanalytic consultant with Boyer House (a residential treatment center for disturbed patients), and supervising analyst for the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and for the San Francisco Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.
The full significance and impact of Boyer's work has even yet to be fully realized in this country. Nevertheless, the wide range of his interests, the forcefulness of his ideas, and his very presence make him both a beloved figure and a powerful influence on the growing number of clinicians dedicated to analyzing the more profound levels of psychic disturbance.