Orgel: Dr. Calder. how did you come to be a psychoanalyst?
Calder: I had no interest in becoming one until I took a residency in psychiatry. That was in Cincinnati in 1945–46. My wish to study psychiatry began years earlier, even though I don't know for sure all the sources of this interest. I had worked in a mental hospital for two summers during college. My background, coming from Michigan's Upper Peninsula, could not have been more primitive. I assume I was pushed by ideals, such as the wish to belong to a “helping profession,” all the way down—or up—to a wish to reduce my family's psychopathology and my own.
The psychiatry taught at Columbia's medical school was disappointing. So much so that I decided to intern in Boston and seek a career in internal medicine. One of my fellow interns—Billy Ransohoff—was from Cincinnati, and he raved about the high quality of psychiatry there. So I decided to try a year of psychiatry at Cincinnati, even though I was enjoying internal medicine very much.
In Cincinnati I was immediately enchanted. The Department of Psychiatry (Romano, Engel, Levine, Rosenbaum, Colby, Plunkett, Kapp, Krug, plus, from medicine, Cene Ferris, Reiser, and Szasz) was outstanding, and was strongly oriented toward psychoanalysis. 1 was attracted to psychoanalysis the moment I was exposed to it.
From Cincinnati I went into the army and was stationed at the School of Psychiatry at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. I met many analysts there, and decided to return to New York for analytic training at the new center at Columbia. I stayed only a year there, however, because 1 felt that Rado, the dominant figure at that time, taught psychotherapy rather than psychoanalysis. And psychotherapy was not what 1 was seeking.
Orgel: What an unusually sophisticated evaluation! You must have been attuned to the differences very early. And you knew what you wanted.
Calder: Perhaps I could be so positive because I knew so little. In any case, I took a year off and ultimately became a candidate at the New York Institute. Then, about five years after I graduated, I became dissatisfied with myself and repeated my training: a second analysis, supervision of one adult case and two child analyses, as well as taking the Institute's courses a second time.
Orgel: This is so unusual that I, and I'm sure our colleagues as well, would like to hear more, especially about your decision to repeat much of your training. I don't know anyone who has had the curiosity, diligence, and dedication to do that.
Calder: Well, explaining it is not an easy assignment, since much of what went into the decision was personal. The spirit of the decision, however, I think we all share. It is the same spirit that goes into consultations with psychoanalytic colleagues, entering reanalysis, pursuing self-analysis, obtaining peer supervision, and so on. But let me turn the tables on you here. How did you come to want to be an analyst?
Orgel: I made what now seems an extraordinarily firm decision at a very early age. I remember that our high school biology club visited Brooklyn State Hospital a number of times, and patients were actually interviewed before us. Those afternoons totally fascinated me. In those days, Freud, along with Marx, was a culture hero for introspective, intellectual, “political” kids like my friends and me, even though we hardly knew in any depth what they said or meant. I know that as a teenager I wanted to learn about the secret parts of people's minds; such knowledge seemed a wonderful, even magical power to have. Like you, I was driven to understand my family—and how the person I thought I was, was related to them. I went to college and medical school with no doubt that I wanted to become a psychoanalyst, and I was eager to be analyzed.
But getting back to you. For years you've been highly regarded as a practicing analyst and teacher. But these days, spending one's life doing and teaching analysis can no longer be taken for granted. Perhaps you might like to say something about the pleasures and trials of being a clinical analyst, and what it has meant to you to have spent a professional lifetime immersed in clinical analysis.
Calder: I don't know whether my most important experiences have been in the practice of psychoanalysis or in being analyzed. The two experiences join in many ways. The practice of psychoanalysis has brought many satisfactions, but also great distress. The weight of being responsible for someone's analysis, working alone in a complex field where few principles are beyond dispute, and where the meaning of an individual hour or of a dream is often obscure, can be formidable.
But it has been a pleasure to have the opportunity to try to make sense of what I have been able to see, hear, and feel. An extra reward is that our colleagues are generally intelligent, informed, and introspective, and it is a pleasure to share ideas, enthusiasms, personal concerns, and so on, with them. It has been enriching also to have known candidates and analysts from other countries.
Orgel: You have been a central figure in the IPA for many years. Could you tell us about the special pleasure you experienced in serving on its Executive Council?
Calder: I spent sixteen years there—three terms as Treasurer, three as a Vice-President, and two as Associate Secretary for North America. There were many pleasures, it has been particularly interesting to hear reports on psychoanalytic universals, such as hysteria, appearing in the wrappings of a foreign culture. And it was a privilege to be able to use our experiences and knowledge to help individuals or groups struggling with problems similar to ours. In turn, we could often learn
from the successes and failures of psychoanalysts and groups abroad. We in the U.S. tend to slight analysts from abroad, in part because we know little about them or their concepts. But I'd like to know what you see when you think about the future of psychoanalysis.
Orgel: There is almost a delight in this country today in pronouncing us moribund, if not worse. There is a lot of confusion in many people's minds, I think, between how we began, how we worked in earlier days, what we believed and stood for then, and what today we have evolved into. And, of course, we hardly represent a single voice, either theoretically or in terms of how we work, what and how we teach, and who we are as individuals. Like you, my focus has been on practicing psychoanalysis and educating future analysts, and my hopes and expectations for the future center on these.
I believe many analysts will treat relatively few patients in analysis in the foreseeable future. And so, our survival as a profession, let alone our satisfaction and moral justification for providing this expensive, time-consuming, and difficult procedure, will depend on our doing it well. The results must justify the effort. We will survive, even prosper, because we will deserve to survive if we work generously and tactfully with our communities, if we keep our economic expectations modest, if we preserve our autonomy and “civil rights” (even at the cost of sacrificing some third-party support), and if we remain open to what we don't know and can't do—yet. One encouraging trend in many institutes, including New York and NYU, is that some of the most talented and devoted individuals entering therapeutic professions today are coming to us to learn and eventually be a part of us. They come from varied backgrounds, offbeat people who don't confuse excellence with elitism, people who have been searching within themselves to find ways of understanding and coping with the uncongenial world of the sound bite and the quick fix. But tell us about your wishes and expectations for the future, Dr. Calder.
Calder: In 1920, on the occasion of the founding of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, Freud said that a psychoanalytic institute should serve three functions: research, education, and service to the community. My priorities are close to those he recommended, but I will focus on one, service to the community, and will address it from the standpoint of our relationship to money, to science, and to medicine.
A case can be made, I believe, that one is providing a “service to the community” if one facilitates someone's getting analyzed when that is the proper treatment for that person. At present we frequently can't accomplish this goal because psychoanalysis is too expensive for many potential analysands. And one way to make analysis available to such individuals is to lower fees. As an experiment, we might recommend that all analysts analyze one or more patients at a fee of twenty-five dollars or less per session. Such a service might improve our public image and would also enable more analysts to spend more time practicing the art and the science of psychoanalysis.
A second way to encourage potential analysands to seek analysis is to study analysis as a treatment modality using scientific methods. I think we should measure whatever we can measure and not be put off by the complexities of the task. I see it as our good fortune that a dozen or so projects are already under way in which various aspects of clinical analysis are being studied. One pertinent area is follow-up studies. I think it should be understood that each five years or so we will conduct new follow-up studies. Our findings will not be as precise as those of physics or chemistry, but gradually we can refine the methods and develop the expertise of our research personnel.
A third way: when analysts teach in medical schools and other academic settings, the findings and contributions of psychoanalytic thinking become more available to the community. Students who are exposed to this knowledge may benefit personally. And their work with their patients in both sickness and health, then and in future years, becomes enhanced with qualities of understanding derived from psychoanalysis.
Orgel: I think we are both saying that if we face present-day realities, there is no reason to despair about our future. Quite the contrary. Thank you, Dr. Calder.