Little did Arnold “Chuck” Rothstein know, growing up in Brighton Beach and attending Lincoln High School, that his selection as a member of New York's all-city football team would take him to the podium as a plenary speaker at a meeting of The American. Yet that is where he will find himself this December.
As Chuck tells it, he learned his “administrative skills” early and attracted the attention of the Brown University Club of New York City, as a result of which he became “the only New York Jewish guy on a football scholarship to Brown.”
“Brown turned my life around,” he recalls. “I grew up in an environment where nobody did anything intellectual; my mother never even went to high school. I had read only two real books before college—Johnny Tremain and Thirty Seconds over Tokyo”. Today he has himself written or edited a total of nine books.
Upon graduating from Brown, he attended the Chicago Medical School, after which he moved to a medical-pediatric internship and a year of urology residency. Bored by surgery, he found his way eventually to a one-year psychiatric residency at Hillside Hospital, followed by a year of child fellowship at Albert Einstein. He began analytic training at Columbia while still a first-year resident and has never been bored since.
He attributes much of his success to his wife of twenty-one years, Arden: “We are both analysts, and we both love it, share it, and live it. What you are as a person, you are as an analyst.” And that success has been considerable.
More than most analysts, Rothstein has combined innovative administrative skills with a comprehensive scholarly view of the field, the latter clearly evident in his two major works, The Narcissistic Pursuit of Perfection and The Structural Hypothesis: An Evolutionary Perspective. Although in recent years he has developed and advocated compromise formation theory, he has, in this most pluralistic of eras, dedicated himself to the careful examination of all the major theoretical approaches. This was his intent when he founded The American's workshop series of publications, based on what are now the Seminars for Clinicians, which he chaired for seven years.
The achievement for which Rothstein feels proudest, however, is the mental health program he founded at the Lexington School for the Deaf. The program provides psychoanalytically oriented therapy to deaf children, a population previously regarded as untreatable psychoanalytically. He has also led a delegation of analysts to the Soviet Union, where they taught a curriculum later published as The Moscow Lectures on Psychoanalysis, and at the New York Institute he founded an outreach program for mental health professionals.
Currently he is Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Mount Sinai Medical Center, and a member of both the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine and the New York Psychoanalytic Society. He has served on the Program Committee of The American for the past fifteen years and in May 1995 will complete six years as chair.
With echoes to his all-city football roots, he likens his job as program chair to being “manager of a team of all-stars: the important thing is to let people do their things and then stay out of their way.” While encouraging the committee to be more scholarly and systematic in its selection of panels, he has overseen the innovation of several new programs: panel discussions of scientific papers, including the Classics Revisited format; the two-day workshop series in process and technique; psychoanalytic courses; psychoanalytic clinical dialogues; programs for spouses; and the Menninger Prize. He has also instituted a more democratic policy regarding discussion groups, whereby any member can propose and lead a group without having to compete with other groups for approval.
As chair of the Program Committee, and as a member of The American, Arnold Rothstein brings both a street-wise sense and the deft skills of an all-city manager to the planning of meetings and the presentation of his own scholarship. All of these talents will be in evidence as he addresses his colleagues this December.