One cannot think of the history of psychoanalysis, especially in Philadelphia, without thinking of Robert Waelder, the intellectual doyen of our analytic community for more than twenty-five years. He was a rare man whose vitality and catholicity of mind paralleled the depth of his humanity. His was no pale humanism masking a shallow sentimentality.
Striking contrasts were abundantly in evidence in his personality. As deeply passionate as he was utterly rational, his was a sense of beauty that would find expression in his response to the elegance of an abstract formalism in mathematical physics quite as much as was evident in his feeling for classical Greek sculpture, for the small gold figures of the Attic and Geometric periods in his own superb collection, which he loved so much.
To know the mind of classical Greece was to understand the mind of Robert Waelder, his attitude toward nature, toward tragedy, toward pathos in the life of man, his confrontation with fate.
His early education in Vienna was marked by his precocity. A talented mathematician, he received his doctorate in mathematical physics at twenty-one. Then, for several years, his interest turned to his studies in political science and history at the University of Vienna.
Following an analysis with Anna Freud, Waelder was captivated by psychoanalysis; by 1925, he was firmly committed to a future in the field.
Very soon he became a member of Freud's circle; by 1928 he had written a review and penetrating critique of Freud's monumental “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety.” In 1932 he and Ernst Kris became coeditors of Imago.
Robert Waelder brought to psychoanalysis the mind of the polymath, imbued with a unique talent for constructive abstraction and generalization. Nowhere, in all his writing, is this more evident than in his paper “The Principle of Multiple Function,” published in 1930. Of all his works, he regarded this as the one most likely to stand the test of time. He once told me that he thought his study of physics may have been decisive in the essence of his concept of multiple function in problem solving in the mind issuing in compromise as solution. Typical of his proud modesty, he referred to the paper as “that small work.”
Clarity, how often we heard him plead for clarity. He thought the day-to-day work of analysis was clarification leading to recognition of pattern and, later, only after redundancy sufficient to resolve ambiguity had been achieved, was interpretation possible. If one turns to his essay “Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method, and Philosophy,” the book review he wrote in 1962 as a critique of the so-called Hook symposium, one finds a masterpiece of his remarkable capacity for clear, discursive analysis. Never vindictive, never uncharitable, intolerant only of hypocrisy and cant, he could be a devastating critic.
He suffered from total recall; very few of his colleagues were aware of it. He once recounted an experience from his childhood in Vienna when, at the age of five, taken by his father to a meeting of a ladies' club to meet his mother, he had recited part of Goethe's Faust from memory. Even as he remembered the fawning adulation, more than sixty years later the pain of his early embarrassment was still plainly evident.
During a meeting of our CAPS group, of which he was permanent moderator, he was challenged on a point; in reply he said the answer had been given by Plato in The Sophist. Then, to the utter amazement of everyone, he quoted the relevant section in the classical Greek and translated it into English.
On another occasion, in a class at the Institute of the Association, a student asked a question. In answering, Waelder made a passing reference to Maxwell's Demon to illustrate his point. The student, having no knowledge of physical chemistry, did not understand. Waelder went to the blackboard and flawlessly developed the second law of thermodynamics and then patiently explained it in nonmathematical terms. He knew statistical mechanics.
He loved to read; he read the classics. Apart from the depth of his interest in psychoanalysis, he immersed himself in history, particularly sociopolitical history. He was influenced by de Tocqueville and Max Weber.
Read his “Conservative Criticism of Modernity.” Like de Tocqueville he was conservative; he apprehended the rising tide of radical egalitarianism, fearing, in his prescience, the “absence of a stable norm and an effective homeostasis that would bring life back to equilibrium after each crisis.” As he said, his conservatism was European, not American.
Distrustful of all ideology, he loved the United States, grateful for the freedom he found here. In his lifetime he had experienced the immolation of Europe in the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist riots in the streets of Weimar and the rise of Fascism, culminating in the unspeakable evil of the Holocaust and the tragedy of World War II.
He had read Marx as he had read Rousseau; how clearly he understood the fatal attraction of the millenarian dream; dialectical materialism, Teutonic triumphalism in the Aryan Übermensch, and the incredibly romantic, destructive naiveté of Rousseau, who held that man, in his nature, was innocent and, in his misery, only the passive victim of circumstance.
How well he knew that the mask of ideology belied the usurpation of power; that the emergence of totalitarianism succeeded revolution.
In his elegant, moving tribute to his mentor, Hermann Weyl, one of the greatest mathematical
physicists of the twentieth century, the great cosmologist John Archibald Wheeler quoted Weyl as follows: ‘“All history in the proper sense is concerned with the development of one singular phenomenon: human civilization on earth.’ What it takes to do history is not science, not mathematics, not a measuring device but interpretation. Interpretation ‘springs from the inner awareness and knowledge of myself. Therefore the work of a great historian depends on the richness and depth of his own experience.’”
How aptly this fits Waelder, the historian, how apposite to Waelder, the psychoanalyst, in his study of living history in the patient in psychoanalysis.
Utterly honest, he was also invariably courteous, reserved, and modest. In all the years I knew him, never once was he cruel or insensitive to others. As each of us is, he was vulnerable. He had suffered much in his life, and his reserve protected him but was never offensive. Many in his family had perished in the Holocaust, and he was never free of the pain of that loss.
How excited he would have been had he lived to see the current explosion of research and discovery in the neurosciences. While not a physician, he understood well the aphorism of Paul Valery in his Analects: “Functional understanding of the nervous system should react on the ideas we have of the value of knowledge in general, on our concepts of certainty, of the Universe, of Man — and all the rest.”
He felt that the essential values, the ethos, underlying psychoanalysis as a therapy were medical.
During his last years, beset by episodes of pulmonary edema, often short of breath, he worked incessantly. He knew and was harmed by the envy of those of lesser talent. I was personally aware of the intransigent effort to block his appointment to the faculty of a major university in more than one instance. Inwardly resolute, he continued on. Not until 1965, through the intervention of his dear friend Samuel Guttman, was he appointed Professor of Psychoanalysis in the Department of Psychiatry of the Thomas Jefferson University.
In the spring of 1965 he gave the Freud Anniversary Lecture of the New York Psychoanalytic
Institute. Expanded, the lecture became his Psychoanalytic Avenues to Art. This small work epitomizes his thought on aesthetics, a clear reflection of his knowledge of art and his love of beauty.
Later, in the fall, he was invited to give the Honorary Address to the Annual Judicial Conference of the Third Federal Judicial Circuit of the United States, including the entire Supreme Court. His lecture, 'The Concept of Justice and the Quest for an Absolutely Just Society,“ was received with three standing ovations. It is an elegant, incisive overview of the continuing conflict between the ideals of liberty and equality.
After Christmas he gave the Presidential Lecture to the American Academy of Political Science. Entitled “Revolution in the Twentieth Century,” it was yet another triumph, echoing the success of another invitation, thirty years earlier, when he addressed the Secretariat of the League of Nations on “Psychoanalysis, War, and International Relations.”
His last year saw the publication of his masterful last book, Progress and Revolution, and his last major address, delivered to the Assembly of the Pennsylvania Bar Association, entitled “Conflicts of Values and Moral Dilemmas.” It could well be considered a coda to all the work of his life. Published in the Pennsylvania Bar Association Quarterly in June 1967, only three months before his death, this address is a transparently lucid, remarkably condensed statement of dilemmas confronting our society and should be read by every citizen concerned with the rending of our social fabric in these times. Characteristic of him, it is a plea for moderation, an appeal to compromise. In the close of his address, there are echoes of his great principle of multiple function: 'To my mind, all the political and social philosophies of our age—progressivism and traditionalism, individualism and collectivism, populism and elitism, capitalism and socialism, nationalism and internationalism—have a core of defensible interest and responsible doctrine; and all become destructive of life once moderation is discarded and one doctrine is carried to its ultimate conclusion, without regard for interfering values and considerations. As one observer has recently put it: Our age is too rational for sanity.
“It was the essence of classical thinking that tragedy does not stem from any particular interest but from hubris—from the self-righteousness and moral solipsism to which all people, all classes, all nations, are prone—particularly when opportunity seems favorable.”
He qualified the term rational, sensing that “rationalistic” might be more appropriate “because true rationality would take account of these complexities.”
Devoted and unsparing in his commitment to our Association, he was a superb lecturer who loved to teach. His method was Socratic; his exposition of the metapsychology of psychoanalysis brilliant.
The profound respect he felt for the integrity of Freud never wavered; his sense of loyalty and gratitude to Freud as a person remained undimmed to the very end.
Two weeks before Robert Waelder passed away, he quoted to his old friend Henry Kleiner the words of William of Orange at the head of his troops before joining battle: “One need not hope in order to begin, one need not succeed in order to persevere.”
It had been his credo throughout his life.
We lost him in September 1967, more than twenty-five years have passed, and he still is missed. His legacy to us remains in the wisdom in his writings, and in his passionate quest for truth.
As Paul Valery observed in his tribute to Goethe, he had “that diversity of gifts which is essential to minds of the highest order.”
How true that was of Robert Waelder.
Paul Gerard Ecker, M.D.