For the now thirty-year-old research training program at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute (SCPI), 1995 and 1996 are exciting years. Scholars in neurobiology, comparative literature, and Latin American culture (of late, mainly from UC-Irvine), as well as an innovative assistant dean at the University of California, have recently entered the training program, bringing with them fresh points of view and keen scientific and literary minds. (See TAP 27/2 for Peter Loewenberg's observations on the challenges and problems that arise when talented clinicians and researchers are put together in SCPI seminars.)
While one founder of the research scholars program, Samuel Eisenstein, continues to practice actively and to support the endeavors of the program, the other founder, Sigmund Gabe, died in 1995. At a recent meeting, the SCPI board voted unanimously to rename the research scholarship fund the Eisenstein-Gabe Research Fund. The board fully supported the recommendation of the Research Scholars Committee, headed by Mauricio Mazon, chair of the department of history at USC. The other committee members are John Altman, Franklin Dines, Esther Dreifuss-Katan, Janet Hadda, Allen Johnson, Peter Loewenberg, and Joseph Natterson.
Gabe and Eisenstein both served long terms as chair of the SCPI Education Committee — 1964–1969 and 1969–1977, respectively — and they created and saw to the completion of the institute's research training program. In 1964 Gabe began to enlarge the existing academic research program, while Eisenstein, the man most responsible for envisioning, shaping, and ensuring the stability and success of the research training program, was inspired by Freud's vision, as enunciated in The Question of Lay Analysis (1926): “If — which may sound fantastic today — one had to found a college of psycho-analysis, … analytic instruction would include branches of knowledge which are remote from medicine and which the doctor does not come across in his practice: the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion, and the science of literature. Unless he is well at home in these subjects, an analyst can make nothing of a large amount of his material” (SE 20:246).
Eisenstein had the genial idea of a Research Training Fellowship to help young academics pay for their training analysis. He followed through vigorously, year after year, pushing an often ambivalent membership to renew the $10,000 stipend so that yet another university-based researcher could be trained in psychoanalysis. Today SCPI has voted an annual voluntary assessment of fifty dollars to encourage members to finance the fellowship, while institutions such as the Marjorie Mosher Schmidt Foundation provide scholarships for academic researchers. As resources are at present extremely limited, a funding drive has been initiated for the Eisenstein-Gabe Research Fund.
This bit of institutional history speaks to what California analysts, organized within The American, can accomplish.
Just as Eisenstein and his associates were solidifying the research scholars program and securing state support, I was beginning seminars at the institute. My choice of SCPI was influenced first by my experiences with several admired teachers connected to the institute — Gabe himself, Sherwyn Woods, Norman Levy, John Peck, Merril Friend, Marcia Goin, Joe Yamamoto, and Frank Kline. Second, SCPI's gestalt of open inquiry, its accommodation of diverse academic disciplines, fit well with my own exploratory bent. I had absorbed the value of open-ended education and free inquiry growing up with my math-professor father and artist/jack-of-all-trades mother. From this family background, I went on to form mentor-student relationships, sometimes blossoming into friendship, with an incredible string of teachers, including Robert Frost, Roger Sale, Benjamin Demott, Unus Pauling, Julius Richmond, Thomas Szasz, William Kidder, Guy McKahn, William Dement, Bertram Spira, Ruth Aaron, Winthrop Hopgood, E. James Anthony, and Theodore Jacobs.
In short, after two lengthy personal analyses, I'm still hooked on gifted teachers and scholars, even though I've lived with and around them long enough to know them well — warts and all.
In my class at SCPI we had three research scholars. For me, the most memorable of them is E. Victor Wolfenstein. When we began our course on Freud's case studies, it quickly became evident that Vic had been teaching this and related material for at least a decade. He could, with his inimitable lucidity, present one of these cases, articulate Freud's theoretical position at the time it was written up, and proceed to a cogent discussion of alternative formulations.
The result of mixing Victor in with ten more-or-less eager psychiatrist students and their at times overburdened teachers was electrifying and unforgettable. Whether I agreed or disagreed with Victor in a given instance, his masterful grasp of the material invariably caused me to prepare extra hard for seminars.
Another distinguished leader of the research scholars program, particularly in the 1980s and early 1990s, is Peter Loewenberg. A driving force in the program throughout its existence, Peter is the author of two classics in applied analysis: Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach and Fantasy and Reality in History. In Peter's courses on the historical and cultural contexts of Freudian work and writing, I soon began to see that more popular writings on these subjects were lightweight in comparison. When eventually I joined the faculty, I was pleased and proud to be his colleague.
Once, as I was trying to find a telling word or two to characterize the research scholars program, Peter suggested “generative.” This seemed particularly fitting. Scholars from the program write, lecture, and supervise not only in the sprawling University of California system, but also in Texas and New York. A prime example of the program's seminal influence is Robert Dallek of UCLA, with whom I spoke before writing this article. Dallek, who went through the SCPI seminar program, is widely regarded as a leading political biographer, and his work on Lyndon Johnson is an acclaimed standard. A few questions to Dallek elicited a model demonstration of the judicious and parsimonious use of psychoanalytic concepts.
Johnson, it seems, suffered from a terrible sense of emptiness, and struggled to fill himself with round-the-clock work, alcohol, and womanizing. Dallek, though he found Heinz Kohut's ideas helpful in integrating the voluminous data on Johnson's life, did not become wedded to Kohutian theories or to any other school of thought. This helped him to avoid pathologizing his subject. Dallek's writings, and his cordial availability to colleagues and students, indeed provide a bright and lasting example of the generativity of the SCPI research scholars program.