Mayer: Helen, you've been very involved in psychoanalytic education and have been a real innovator in curricular planning for institutes. Tell me how that became such an interest for you.
Meyers: As for my interest in education, I come from a European academic background, where everybody sat around and played with ideas, loved to read and learn and teach, and this has always been very exciting to me. My father was an outstanding scholar and teacher.
Mayer: So he was very much your model.
Meyers: I think so. Though I am a great deal like my mother too, who was very social. But getting back to your question. Of course, I love psychoanalysis. And I love teaching—it's pure joy for me—and, I hope, for my students; and I have gotten much reward and recognition for that. I particularly enjoy theory, though some people think of me in terms of clinical issues. But, like many, I felt that our old curricula—even our curriculum at Columbia, carefully and creatively reworked ten years previously—were no longer doing justice to current psychoanalysis. The field had grown so enormously, and new courses were being added here and there to fill the gap, losing structural and conceptual coherence. We were no longer creating the enthusiasm that psychoanalysis deserved. We needed more scholarly pursuit, more interchange of thoughts, new vision. We needed a different sequencing of course work, presenting theory and technique in increasing complexity, relating the clinical to the theoretical, the historical to the contemporary, and including new concepts and areas of study, while preserving and revising the old. We needed to include knowledge from other disciplines and yet not lose our essence; we needed to create choices and accommodate a diversity of interests. But in addition, I had been convinced for years that is was essential for us analytic thinkers and clinicians to integrate, as well as differentiate, the various psychoanalytic frames of reference and their concomitant technical approaches. And curriculum was the place it had to start.
Mayer: What exactly did you have in mind?
Meyers: It seemed to me that many conceptual currents in psychoanalysis—objects relations theory, self psychology, cognitive studies, developmental theory, and so on—could be incorporated in the curriculum as aspects of ego psychology, which I thought provided an umbrella under which we could be very inclusive, yet rigorous and clear. So I devised some courses to teach these different approaches, both comparatively and from the point of view of their own logic, as well as presenting basic related concepts. With this in mind, we developed a curriculum which was, when we established it in 1982, really quite innovative. Of course, we have continued to modify and improve it all the time.
Mayer: What sort of reception did the curriculum get?
Meyers: Actually very enthusiastic, both from candidates and from the faculty. We have been very fortunate to have a wide range of faculty at Columbia, both clinicians and theorists. We have those who think of themselves as very classical, some as object relations theorists, and others who have developed their own interesting points of view. So candidates get to hear the divergences; it is very stimulating to learning. And faculty have a lot of choice about how they approach their subject matter. My object was to devise a curriculum that was pluralistic but also highly integrated. It is hard for candidates to do this for themselves while learning—that is, to integrate the profusion of theories. I felt that to start with we needed to show how it all can be understood as a whole—at least from one perspective, without foreclosing the possibility of there being other ways of viewing it. Later, graduates can formulate their own versions.
Mayer: With regard to clinical approaches, as well as theory.
Meyers: Absolutely. We try to introduce it in all our process courses, depending on the instructor, of course. For example, we have an elective in which, in successive meetings, the same two analytic sessions will be discussed by clinicians with very different points of view, from different institutes, with myself and a coinstructor clarifying, integrating, and differentiating the approaches in between. The object is not to have a confrontation, but to expose the candidates to as wide a point of view as possible without confusing them. Again, pluralistic but integrative.
Mayer: This approach certainly was innovative when you developed it. Is it more common now, do you think? Was your approach picked up by other institutes?
Meyers: I think some of the general approach is more common now. We have had several regional meetings, and panels at The American, along these lines since—that is, the attempt to view clinical material using different frames of reference. That is, of course, not at all the same as integrating the theories. As for curricula, when I first presented our new curriculum at The American, way back, there was much enthusiasm and interest, and several institutes set up somewhat similar programs. I have been asked to be a consultant at various points. You know, it's not that we have excluded the sort of historical approach to learning psychoanalysis that has been traditional in psychoanalytic education. We are careful to incorporate an historical understanding, to read the original authors, to know when and why new theories came into being, and our candidates are well-grounded in Freud. But, at the same time, we also focus on a horizontal, conceptually integrated approach. We also have a wide array of elective courses, which elaborate and enlarge the field, which I feel very good about.
Mayer: And your writings and lectures—do they reflect the same approach?
Meyers: Well, to some extent. I am currently working on a book on my integration of the different frames of reference, and on a long book on supervision, but of course much of my writing and lecturing has been on very diverse analytic subjects—from technical topics such as transference-countertransference, reconstruction, and reanalysis, to theoretical issues concerning aggression, masochism, perverse fantasies, and adolescence, as well as male and particularly female psychology.
Helen C. Meyers, M.D., is chair of the Training and Supervising Analyst Committee and past associate director of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. She is chair of the Regional Council of Psychoanalytic Societies of Greater New York and past president of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine. At The American she is currently a councilor-at-large, an alternate Fellow of BOPS, a member of the Program Committee, and a representative to the NAIPAG Liaison Committee, in addition to having served on the editorial board of JAPA. She is also secretary of the IPA's Program Committee, a North American delegate to the IPA House of Delegates, and North American representative on the IPA Executive Council.
Mayer: Which reminds me: quite apart from general curricular innovations, you have also been a driving force behind the introduction of female psychology as a subject in psychoanalytic curricula.
Meyers: In curricula around the country, perhaps. At Columbia, I was not the first to be interested in women's issues, but I did teach the first elective on female psychology, being convinced for years that we needed such a course. It needed to be an elective at that time; now, the whole area of female development has been much more integrated into the overall curriculum, as well as constituting a course in itself. In keeping with my general pluralistic approach, it may interest you that the second time I taught the elective, I invited a male colleague from a different institute to teach it with me. We agreed and disagreed on many things, but I thought it would be useful to bring in a man's point of view—it was kind of fun. But now the tenor has changed a good deal; today female psychology is integrated into courses taught by men as well as women, and we are looking for a new and better understanding of male psychology.
Mayer: Do you oversee how the integration is effected in particular courses?
Meyers: Originally, I suppose I did oversee it, because I was designing the whole curriculum and wanted to make sure it happened. Now, I think it's simply become an assumption in the minds of faculty, and it's mostly up to them.
Mayer: You have what strikes me as an unusual number of senior women analysts at Columbia. That must have helped make female psychology a topic of broad interest.
Meyers: Yes, we have always had an unusual number of women in leadership positions; early on, Viola Bernard, Ruth Easser, and Henriette Klein, and, somewhat later, Ethel Person, Paulina Kernberg, and myself. Among the younger people assuming important posts are Betsy Auchincloss, Lila Kalinich, Lucy LaFarge, Ellen Rowntree, and Gloria Stern. Perhaps it's not that we actually have had more women at Columbia, but that the ones we had have been very bright, visible, vocal, and active as training analysts and so have had a big impact.
Mayer: You have been very involved administratively—at Columbia, at The American, and now at the International.
Meyers: Well, I think if you want to have an opportunity to educate, to be effective with your ideas, you have to be involved administratively. And if you want to further psychoanalysis, if it's important enough to you, you need to work and get involved. That is, I suppose, one reason I have been working on so many committees—from the curriculum and executive committees at Columbia, to the Program Committee, JAPA Board, and BOPS at The American, to the Program Committee and House of Delegates at the IPA.
Mayer: And you have become such an advocate for women—how did that come about?
Meyers: It's curious: I am a Jewish Viennese. In the culture I grew up in, women were considered fully equal to men intellectually. My parents were both physicians, and women in my extended family were all culturally, artistically, and intellectually very impressive people. I was astonished when I came to this country to see how women had to fight to be intellectually equal to men. I came to women's issues not from a sense of deprivation but with a sense of real conviction based on what had been possible for me.
Mayer: So your family left Vienna when—before the Anschluss?
Meyers: No, immediately after. I am in constant awe, still, of what my parents did. They were dyed-in-the-wool Viennese, but as soon as they heard the news of the Anschluss, they picked up and left with my older brother and me. We left with nothing except four first-class tickets on the Normandie, a luxury liner. It was unbelievably courageous and, of course, wise; we got out before anything serious happened. You know, my colleagues say something must be wrong with me because I feel I had a happy childhood, and my
“We lived two blocks from Freud in Vienna, I played with his grandchildren, my grandmother briefly was a patient of his, and I had read Freud very early on with an older cousin….”
admiration for my parents is consistent and remains so, but I think I have been very lucky.
Mayer: And your arrival here? Were you aware of differences in attitudes toward women's intellectual capacities even then?
Meyers: No, that came later. What I did think at the time was that there was less emphasis on learning in school, less pressure. Of course that was public, not private, school. When I arrived I was put in a sixth-grade class and was utterly bored. I had been doing advanced mathematics in Vienna, and here my peers were learning to add and subtract. But they were my age, so the school said that that was where I needed to stay. So one day I just got off the subway and walked into a high school that I had picked out of the phone book, gave them my Viennese credentials, and told them I had just arrived. I avoided the issue of my age, and they put me in ninth grade. The elementary school couldn't get rid of the notion that I was a truant, so they kept contacting my parents to get me back to school. My parents, of course, supported me.
Mayer: But you did it on your own: that took a lot of initiative for a twelve-year-old in a strange country.
Meyers: I don't know. I think it was a little arrogant and a bit psychopathic, but it seemed pointless to stay for years where I wouldn't learn anything—so it seemed natural. Then they “skipped” me some more, as we used to call it, and made me valedictorian. So I ended up in medical school at age nineteen.
Mayer: And you knew you wanted to be an analyst?
Meyers: I'd wanted to be an analyst from way, way back. We lived two blocks from Freud in Vienna, I played with his grandchildren, my grandmother briefly was a patient of his, and I had read Freud very early on with an older cousin who was something of a mentor to me. And my father, who was a great authority in the field of neuroophthalmology, was consultant at the Psychiatric Clinic Poetzl; his interest in the brain certainly contributed to mine. Finally, you know, psychoanalysis was an extraordinary element of the atmosphere in middle-class Jewish Vienna. So, yes, it was a very early interest to me—though all the time in college I strongly considered becoming a journalist.
Mayer: And then you married an analyst.
Meyers: Actually, Don and I met long before we became analysts. We got together around our common interest in ballet and skiing. Then we entered analytic training at different times. Our interests and styles of thinking in psychoanalysis are somewhat different—he was more interested in early development and psychosis. He is a wonderful clinician and very intuitive. I am a bit more of a theoretician. But we certainly have collaborated a great deal and continue to do so. For example, I helped Don start the child analysis program at Columbia some years back, and he has taught me a great deal about preverbal issues. Of course, we collaborate a great deal more in other matters—our love for ballet and opera and music and theater, and our appreciation of Switzerland and France and good food and other pleasures, including a great family.
Mayer: You have a son?
Meyers: Yes, and I have only one thing to say in describing him: absolute perfection! Also we have a great daughter-in-law and a fantastic new granddaughter.
Mayer: Speaking of your son, let me ask you about the COPE Workshop on Issues for Women in Psychoanalytic Education (see TAP 28/3), a group you and Barbara Deutsch started in the early eighties, in which issues about combining motherhood and analytic training have been an ongoing topic of discussion. That group has been of enormous importance to many participants.
Meyers: Yes, I think it has. It's also been one of the most productive groups in The American in
terms of generating articles, research like your own, programs like the women's mentorship program, and even a book—Nadine Levinson and Eleanor Schuker's Female Psychology: An Annotated Bibliography:
Mayer: It's been attended almost entirely by women, but a Jem men have come over the years and a couple of them are regulars. What is your feeling about keeping groups like that all female?
Meyers: I don't think it needs to be or should be all women. At the last meeting of the International, I organized a discussion group on pregnancy, and I invited senior women analysts who happened to have written on that subject, from all over the world. The discussion was extraordinarily good, but even more interesting was the quality of support and warmth. These are powerful women who are treating each other very differently than they do in mixed-gender groups. God knows I like to talk to men, but I think there's some benefit in keeping things separate sometimes. During that meeting one analyst, who is internationally renowned and who certainly has worked very successfully with men for years, remarked that she hadn't felt so comfortable and relaxed since her days being raised in a girls' boarding school. So it's an interesting question. I guess women need to talk with men, but they need to talk among themselves.
Mayer: Helen, let me ask you a final question, perhaps an inevitable one these days. How do you see the future of psychoanalysis?
Meyers: I am very optimistic. Psychoanalysis is here to stay—not just in intellectual, academic life but as a field in itself. The cross-fertilization that is happening is very exciting. I see great potential as regards biological psychiatry; I also see many creative exchanges with other disciplines, given the increasing numbers of nonmedical analysts. And I'm fascinated by the increasing dialogue between Latin America, Europe, and the U.S.—there's increasing interest in integrating their approaches with ours. The common ground is greater than we thought, though it is complicated to establish and really understand. But the gathering-in will make us stronger and enrich us; I'm not worried about dilution.
Mayer: That's consistent with so much you have espoused over the years. You seem determined to function as a catalyst in bringing people together and getting them talking.
Meyers: I am. I am a kind of international wanderer, though also very American. I am used to different cultures, different languages. It is easy for me to see the merit in points of view different from my own, though I strongly believe in maintaining standards. I think also that people are not afraid to argue with me, so they are open with me. Mostly I believe that people are basically good and that if you give them a chance, they will work things out, even in the face of differences and diversity, and will grow in the process. That is, I suppose, why I have organized so many conferences and have been active in national and international psychoanalytic organizations. I do believe in getting people together, and most of all in getting them talking and thinking together. I'm optimistic about what that can bring about. That is my great hope for the future; I'd like to see more talking and thinking together, and less politics.
Mayer: It's a great hope, Helen. Your optimism is contagious, and you offer an inspiring vision. Thanks very much.