Link: There's more than a little irony in your being named a Distinguished Friend of Psychoanalysis by The American in 1991, when earlier you were denied admission to the local institute. You were party to the class action suit on behalf of psychologists, were you not?
Inman: Yes. When I couldn't get psychoanalytic training at the local institute in the early eighties, I started traveling to wherever I could find analytic programs. I did all this reading, not according to an institute, but according to my hunger for knowledge about psychoanalysis. And I had supervision. So I was busy getting what I needed the best way I could. I got to reading Winnicott, and that became really valuable to me. He wasn't taught at all in the institute here. Later, I got into all the writings of people interested in creativity and psychoanalysis. I don't think of myself as a very independent person, but the people who didn't do something independent were very impoverished. I think that anyone who was a psychoanalytic psychologist went somewhere else, moved away. At the time, the psychological association here in North Carolina basically became useless to me. It's very good in terms of taking care of psychologists, but as for any kind of education or for meeting like-minded colleagues, I didn't find them there. And the kind of bias that psychoanalysis is old-fashioned and nobody needs to do that was prevalent in the psychological association. So it was real lonely.
Link: And now you've used your own money to set up the Lucy Daniels Foundation, which has as its moving spirit the power of psychoanalysis. Introducing its first annual conference, entitled “Images in Art and Life: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives,” you said, “Creativity turns the ordinary world on its head… . Doing something with feelings takes something you have and transforms it into something else.” Tell me about your own transformations.
Inman: Well, I've done everything backwards. I was a dropout from high school and didn't get my GED until I was almost twenty-two. By then, by 1956, I'd published my first novel, Caleb, My Son, which was a best-seller. And I got my Guggenheim before I ever went to college. Later, in my mid-thirties, I was trying to write and couldn't, and was raising my children. I'd waited all that time because I felt so inferior—so ruined, ruined from all my experiences with anorexia. I'd waited all that time because I felt so inferior.
Link: I read your novels before reading the news clippings about the Daniels family's struggles for control of the newspaper it owned in Raleigh. Reading Caleb I was struck by the multiple themes worked out in a short novel, particularly those about not speaking the unspeakable, about covering over any intimations of internecine strife, and about child murder—not patricide—as an acceptable solution to family and/or racial conflict.
Inman: Caleb, I think, is autobiographical. I didn't know it then, but Caleb is my older sister, and I am Saul.
Link: Isn't Caleb, at some level, also Lucy?
Inman: I guess you're right. As I think about it, I guess one thing is that when I wrote it I was removed from the family. That made it easier to write the story. It's easier to see things when you're not in them. Easier for me. There's a certain way, in that story, that I empathized both with the father and with the son. I guess I wonder about people writing things that they can't bear to know. I mean I do now think that my father almost killed me with the things he said to me at the times that he said them. But I didn't know that when I wrote Caleb. I think that I couldn't bear to know that then.
Link: So the transformations serve to keep some of the pain away even from the creator.
Inman: Indeed.
Link: Then your second novel, High on a Hill, came out in 1961. In college you were Phi Beta Kappa, and you got your Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of North Carolina in just five years.
Inman: Things began to change for me. I finally got into a good analysis. Over those years my four children were growing up. I established my practice. But, you know, I almost didn't get analysis. Because of the stand my parents took, I didn't get any substantive help from them until I was about forty and was raising my children on my own. When I applied to college in my twenties, I was told by the college physicians that I should have an analysis, and my father raged. So I had kind of limped along, very much alone, deciding that no one could help me.
Currently I'm much less isolated. I have a good practice in Raleigh and have two social workers and a psychologist working with me. We do long-term work. Each of them has had analysis. Together we have a good working quietness. And then, the foundation is working out. These things bring me together with people.
Link: Tell me more about your dreams for the work of the Lucy Daniels Foundation.
Inman: I set it up with money coming from the sale of my share of the Daniels family newspaper, the Raleigh News & Observer. Our mission statement says that the foundation, a private nonprofit organization, “will foster a deeper understanding of creativity and personal growth through psychoanalytic treatment and through psychoanalytic research, education and outreach.” We will provide financial subsidy for creative people who undergo psychoanalysis and will conduct longitudinal research on the effects of psychoanalysis on their lives and work. In the fall of 1992 we dedicated the foundation's building, which has an assembly room, offices, treatment rooms, a psychoanalytic library, and five sunny classrooms for the Lucy Daniels Developmental Preschool, an autonomous charity we began in 1991. Another major goal is enhancing psychoanalysis in the cultural life of the Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill area by bringing in lecturers or guest analysts and making what they have to say available to the general public. This, I hope, will allow the foundation's building to become a center where like-minded people will come together for study and enrichment.
“I feel that analysts somehow need to have a dialogue with people who have been helped. I sometimes wonder about the analysts I know—they believe in the transference and in carefully doing the analytic work, but I sometimes wonder if they're really in touch with the magic. I mean this not supernaturally, but I do feel it's so thrilling to have been set free.”
She'd had a terrible day, but came anyway. Kuspit spoke way over her head about van Gogh and Mondrian. He showed slides of tremendous emptiness and of mental institutions, and talked about that emptiness and about how art is all we have. My patient left early, feeling depressed. But a couple sessions later, she said she'd gotten something from van Gogh, that his loneliness somehow made hers less shameful. By the next Monday, she had had a good weekend. She'd gone to the library and gotten lots of books on van Gogh. I just think it's wonderful. If psychoanalysis can do that for people, it should.
Another thing has happened at the preschool. A person who was grateful to her analyst, who had moved away from the area, wanted to give some money to something in honor of that analyst. She made a contribution in her analyst's name. Worried analysts might find some question about that. But just maybe it's okay.
Link: You're saying that's where we shouldn't be so fearful?
Inman: Why can't people express their gratitude? Any ensuing dialogue wouldn't continue with the person who's been your analyst. My own analyst, of course, isn't involved in the work of the foundation. By the time I got into analysis I guess I was living. By that I mean I wasn't going to die of anorexia anymore. But analysis has saved my life. It has made my life something I'm thrilled by. Another thing about psychoanalysis is when you get the feel of it, when you get the gist of how it just keeps on going, any experience you have can be richer. And why shouldn't a person who feels like that—even if they don't have a whole lot of money and if they do have it, fine—by whatever means possible be able to give back in some way that makes them feel fulfilled? Offering small classes with time for discussion is something we hope to do at the foundation. That's not going to be psychoanalysis per se, but it might be able to make people have richer experiences in things they're doing anyway.
I've sort of been locked out all of my life. Or locked in. One or the other. I've only discovered in recent years that there are real advantages to that. I'm not in some mold. I'm not like the psychologists; I'm not like the writers. And when it comes to the analysts, whom I haven't really known until recently, there has to be a certain kind of care exercised. I believe that only people who are qualified should be analysts. I think that's very important. I've had one analyst who really messed up, and I think when someone is messing up in a major way—and it's a major way when they're messing up in their being analysts—that everything should be done for analysts to be screened and trained and capable.
But when you go out in the world and want to let people know about psychoanalysis I think that you have to put that care aside. You have to reach out to people who may be totally incapable of being analysts, to people who may not have the fortitude to undergo an analysis themselves, but who are still capable of being enriched by psychoanalysis. I think that may be a problem analysts have, of being careful on one side and then allowing themselves to be more open on another.
“I think of women as being people who have been discriminated against, like blacks have been discriminated against and deprived. But it's a real problem if you can't go into yourself and look at that. Because if you just blame somebody, or blame the family or whatever, you don't get into the bonds that exist inside yourself, and they're really the ones that keep people from being free—the bonds and the walls that you've set up.”
Inman: Yes. This man came to the preschool and spent four hours there and went in and participated in the therapeutic class, which is fairly disturbed now. He was sensitive to some of the interchanges that were going on there, and so excited about what we were doing. I probably will pursue knowing that person, both in order to nurture the interaction for itself and for what it can do for him. If he decides that this is a place where he can invest his money, if he wants to give money to the preschool, it will be so good for him. It will make him more alive. I think that it's a very sweet thing for people to discover a way they can do something that makes them more in touch with life.
Link: How has it been for you, being at heart a private and introspective person, being at the center of the hoopla, both as a sponsor and as an intellectual participant in the programs of the foundation?
Inman: It's been traumatic for me to break out. But I need to get out. It was hard, when Caleb was so successful, to be on one TV show after another. What's going on now is certainly not without stresses. And I don't like the orthodoxy of a foundation either. I hope when it's going well I can do less of the administrative work. I hope I'm going to make new friends. And I think not only about bringing analysts and artists together, but about what will happen when we bring artists and children together.
Looking at my life now, part of what I feel relates to something my father said about living life to the hilt. But it mostly draws from my own experience of psychoanalysis. Part of it is from being so greedy, wanting a lot. Out of wanting a lot I've gotten a great deal out of analysis, and as a result I don't feel depressed, I don't feel angry, I don't feel bitter. I feel encouraged to go get some more—more of writing, more of life. I don't know why, but I don't want to be an analyst now. I do want to be a therapist; I do want to be a writer. I want to do those as fully as I can. Both of those are kind of outside an orthodoxy.
There are very few things in this part of the country as powerful as the News & Observer. It's been a powerful voice here for ninety years. And I loved the paper, the big stories, everything that happened was exciting. My father used to talk about my being editor of the paper. But I was a girl and I couldn't—even with a Guggenheim—have a place there where I could at least feel dignified. Though we were raised on freedom of speech, the women of the family were never supposed to speak out. Yet, in a sense, the hardships in my life have turned out to be opportunities: If I'd been allowed to be an editor, I'd be stuck back there as an editor. If I'd been able to be an analyst, I'd be an analyst. That, in a way, is like being outside my family—not being outside all my family—but being outside my extended family.
Link: In the discussions at the “Images in Art and Life” Conference it seemed there was a repeating tension between analysts and artists: the latter were eager to contain ideas informed by psychoanalytic understanding, but were loath to envision psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method of approaching a freer creative life.
Inman: My thought is, as we reach out to creative people, that some will be really interested and others will be turned off to the psychoanalytic perspective. They see it risking taking the good driver out of the creative process. I hope people are going to sign up and be our patients for this study, but I feel that people are only going to do something like that if they have a strong need. And I do think that pain is an important part of it. I feel really lucky about this now, but I was in terrible pain for so long. Some people are afraid to face their pain. George Vaillant said in the meeting that creative people don't project blame onto others. Certainly the wonderful thing about psychoanalysis is that in being able to blame yourself, in seeing that you have made a mistake in how you saw something, doors open.
I feel that analysts somehow need to have a dialogue with people who have been helped. I sometimes wonder about the analysts I know—they believe in the transference and in carefully doing the analytic work, but I sometimes wonder if they're really in touch with the magic. I mean this not supernaturally, but I do feel it's so thrilling to have been set free. I know that I'm not the only person to feel this, though I'm probably more thrilled than most—I was nearly dead. I have friends who are so grateful for their lives being changed. I sometimes wonder if analysts really
know about that. And further, if you have had that happen to you, you want to do something with it. Analysts I know have been a little bit surprised to see someone, particularly a psychologist, so enthusiastic about psychoanalysis.
Link: Psychoanalytic institutes and societies spend a fair amount of time discussing the ethical dilemma of soliciting funds from former analysands or even encouraging an ongoing interest in psychoanalytic projects or research. The thought that it might disrupt transferences, which continue even after termination, is certainly a real problem. Yet you seem to have been able to do an end run around these issues, in that rather than waiting to be asked, without someone saying “there you are, you've benefitted by this wonderful treatment we have to offer,” you have become a benefactor of psychoanalysis all on your own.
Inman: Not everybody can do that because they don't have the wherewithal. But certainly institutes and societies could do better, not with what's called outreach, but by offering avenues of creative expression for people who wish to give back. I think in general that psychoanalysts are less than brave about this sort of thing. When I was ready to start the foundation, I called The American to see whether there was one that had been started that I could learn from. And of course there wasn't. I couldn't get in The American, but I am on its Committee on Foundations. In the meetings I've really been surprised at how constantly worried the psychoanalysts seem to be about the business of setting up a foundation and about how to go about doing things.
Link: Worried about doing things that would involve asking former patients directly or indirectly?
Inman: Yes, but also worried about going out. One of the things we hope our building is going to do draws on something I experienced, on another way of my having been lonely. If you've had analysis down here and are yourself not a mental health professional, it's really hard to find other people who have also had analysis. A woman last night said, “I think this program is wonderful,” and went on to say she would hope we'd have some programs where people who have been analyzed and who feel lonely could come and have a sort of community. Maybe people from other parts of the country are not as lonely as that. But here, I think, having analysis puts one very much in the minority. My own patients are lonely.
Link: Because the language they reach out to the world with is different?
Inman: Right. Did I tell you about the patient of mine who went to hear Dick Simons? Heartwarming. Let me go back a bit. Some of my patients became aware that I'd been anorexic as an adolescent. I worked that through a long time ago, so it doesn't impair—though I'm sure it affects—the treatment. I've had patients in treatment after discovering that somewhere, and they stay and work out their stuff and leave. With my dedicating of the foundation—which has been in the papers—now my patients all know I'm a millionaire. Anyway, the North Carolina Psychoanalytic Society invited Dick Simons down here and the foundation was a cosponsor of that—an open meeting at the Museum of Art. It was so wonderful. People could hear someone talk about Michelangelo and Edvard Munch in ways that resonated for them.
From that experience, I thought it would be really nice for the foundation to do that as an annual thing. So this year we invited Donald Kuspit, who is brilliant and doesn't talk down to people. So my patient, who works two jobs to see me twice a week at a reduced fee, came again.
Link: Your first novel, Caleb, My Son, which I found extraordinary in many ways, is particularly remarkable in that a young, Southern white woman had, in 1956, written in the first-person voice of a black man.
Inman: My first published story—which I wrote when I was at the George School—was about a little black boy. I'm sure it's because the black people in my life were the ones who gave me
whatever warmth I got. And I'm sure also that I felt lower class. I wrote Caleb so quickly. There are ways that I felt I was out prematurely. I was twenty-two. Women artists, women today, speak about not being recognized. I think of women as being people who have been discriminated against, like blacks have been discriminated against and deprived. But it's a real problem if you can't go into yourself and look at that. Because if you just blame somebody, or blame the family or whatever, you don't get into the bonds that exist inside yourself, and they're really the ones that keep people from being free—the bonds and the walls that you've set up. It's because of those walls that we're outside. By being able to go into yourself and see what your mistake is, what your fault is, what your barrier is—that makes it easier for people to be free and do things outside themselves. So when there's a thing like “women are discriminated against” (although that's true and although that's unfortunate), trying to deal with it outside is, in itself, depriving. People stop living and then become totally deprived. It would help if women let other women know that the big fight is more on the inside than on the outside. Basically we're talking about how hard it is to stay alive.
Link: In our conversation last week on the phone, you spoke of seeing a similarity between psychoanalysts and the very rich.
Inman: Poor rich people, they don't often get to do things that affect them deeply. And I'm amazed at how held-in most analysts are. I always felt a misfit. I went into the Junior League. I did it to be a good wife. What I found is that those people are so cut off from themselves. After I was a psychologist and had a lot of analysis, I could go to the newspaper's shareholder meetings and could see people in my family who were so deprived—very wealthy, but so deprived. And that I, struggling to raise my children without enough money, was far better off than they. I now feel a certain kind of compassion for people who feel cut off from themselves. I can't spend my time with them. But I now realize that wealthy people are certainly not the only people who are cut off from themselves.
I finally had the gumption to get out. I had to, to preserve my identity. When I found out just how much money was represented in my share of the News & Observer, it became imperative for me to “cash out” of the paper. Essentially, when I took my money out, I severed all ties not only with the paper, but with the family. Our family has never treated women with respect. Why let someone else spend your money on something you don't believe in? The Lucy Daniels Foundation and the preschool and the psychoanalytic research projects represent ways in which I've grappled with feelings about leaving my family of origin. Of course the irony is that without the family paper I would not have the money to be able to do what I am doing with the foundation.
And yet I feel fortunate to have escaped from the rich and from the plights that poor rich people get themselves into. Some wealthy people have expressed an interest in the preschool, but it's as if I have to do the feeling for them. I do, however, believe that some of the stuff we are doing with the foundation is changing people. A very rich man expressed interest in the preschool. Bringing him together with Don Rosenblitt, our director and child psychoanalyst, is a bit hard, because Don has a certain skepticism regarding the rich.
Link: So, not letting the dialogue drop early on in the connection becomes your role.
My grandfather, Josephus Daniels, who started fatherless and poor in western North Carolina and founded the newspaper, would say to us grandchildren, “noblesse oblige.” He translated this for us as meaning “from those unto whom much has been given, much shall be expected.” His words filled me with awe and determination at an early age, but also with worries about measuring up. I'm on the outside, and I'm now finally glad to be. Having been locked out has left me free.
Link: Thank you, Lucy, for the opportunity to interview you and for the intriguing and creative things you've found the power to do on behalf of psychoanalysis.