Arnold Modell was born in New York City in 1924 and grew up in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn, where he attended public schools and graduated from Madison High. He entered Columbia University in 1941 and joined the Navy V-12 program as a premedical student. Already interested in Freud, he was determined to become a psychoanalyst. After graduation from Long Island Medical College in 1947 and a standard internship at Kings County Hospital, he began a residency at Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts, a leading training and research institution, where he learned descriptive psychiatry. In the absence of any effective psychopharmacological treatments and lacking analytically oriented supervision, the young Modell taught himself a kind of heroic psychotherapy with very ill patients, an experience and predilection that shaped much of his subsequent clinical and theoretical interests. This was the kind of therapy, he recounts, in which one develops a relationship with patients by feeding them. Meanwhile, he was already reading Sechehaye, Fairbairn, and Winnicott, who were then but little known in this country.
Further training at the Yale Psychiatric Institute, where Fritz Redlich had recently been named chief, provided Modell his first exposure to prominent psychoanalysts, who came there to teach from New York and from the Austen Riggs Center in nearby Stockbridge. Men like Merton Gill, Ernst Kris, Rudolf Loewenstein, and Robert Knight lent theoretical substance to his growing clinical commitment to borderline and psychotic patients. After a brief stint as a navy psychiatrist, Modell opened a private practice in Boston, where he saw many of these sicker cases four and five times a week. He accepted teaching appointments at Massachusetts Mental Health Center and Beth Israel Hospital (where he remained on the faculty until last year, having attained the rank of Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School). He applied for admission to the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and entered a training analysis with Elizabeth Zetzel. Although well known as a crusty classical analyst, Zetzel impressed Modell as caring and interested in her patients' lives, a quality he often found lacking in many of the prominent teachers at the institute at that time.
Perhaps because of his clinical immersion in work with sicker patients, Modell was already aware of the limitations of both ego psychology and the older “Id analysis,” which in Boston competed in a rivalry represented, respectively, by the Bibrings and the Deutsches. Though he found sensitive clinicians like Beata Rank to be stimulating instructors, his growing fascination with object relations theory tended to isolate him from the psychoanalytic mainstream, leaving him something of an outsider until fairly recently, when his contributions gained wider recognition. His early papers published in JAPA and the International Journal, on topics like “Denial and the Sense of Separateness” , “Primitive Object Relationships: Predisposition to Schizophrenia” , and “The Right to Life: An Aspect of the Superego's Development” , give some of the flavor of these original interests. This work culminated in the ground-breaking Object Love and Reality , which ranges from a fascination with the meanings of the Lascaux cave paintings to consideration of the problem of object relations in schizophrenia. Modell emphasized that for the infant there is no vital reality apart from the mother-child relationship, a theoretical perspective that opened the way to contacts with D.W. Winnicott, who was to remain a major influence.
Not one by temperament inclined to the political, or tempted to found a school, Modell was nonetheless a well-respected member of the Boston analytic community, as indicated by his nomination as training analyst in 1971. He published significant works on affect theory and object relations, which he now saw as equally relevant to work with conflicts in higher-functioning patients. For example, his elucidation of the phenomena of noncommunication of affects and the illusion of self-sufficiency as defenses against relationship provided a theoretical bridge between the intrapsychic and intersubjective domains. These issues were expounded in his highly influential Psychoanalysis in a New Context , which, in a way unusual for American psychoanalysis, addressed the philosophical underpinnings of theory. Psychoanalysis, he stressed, is about the influence one person has on another, a conception elaborated in his third book, Other Times, Other Realities: Toward a Theory of Psychoanalytic Treatment . Perhaps it is this orientation that led one thoughtful commentator to bestow on Modell the epithet “analyst-philosopher.”
At the same time, Modell was developing an interest in the neuropsychological theories of Gerald Edelman, which combine aspects of cognitive psychology, computer science, and neuroembryology. In thus moving from archaeology to natural science, as it were, and from philosophy to clinical theory, he evidenced an impressive range of interests faithful to his initial inspiration by Sigmund Freud. One continuous thread, however, has been Modell's fascination with understanding the nature of self, which finds fullest expression in his most recent book, The Privacy of the Self . Meanwhile, he continues to teach and to practice, taking time out for his favorite pastimes—yoga and the outdoors—while maintaining his original course out of, and in advance of, the mainstream.