In the last few years, perhaps as a consequence of the economic constraints working against psychoanalysts having full-time clinical practices, some analysts have been spending more time outside of the consulting room while maintaining their professional identity (see Leon Hoffman, “Parent-Child Center Reaches out to New York Families,” in TAP 30/1). During the last five years I have helped organize, volunteered in, and supported several youth service initiatives, most notably LEAP (Leadership, Education and Athletics in Partnership), a statewide, year-round mentoring and tutoring program currently serving more than seven hundred inner-city children and employing nearly two hundred college and public high-school students as counselors. Although I had wrestled with the decision not to practice psychoanalysis full-time, I find that I have not left the fold. As I've become more involved in community organizing and child advocacy, I've been struck with how broadly relevant the psychoanalytic perspective and my training have become. I find that what I've learned as a psychoanalyst is nearly as useful “in the streets” as in the consulting room. What follows are some of my experiences as an active board member with LEAP and how what I've learned as a psychoanalyst is useful in working with and observing providers of youth service.
LEAP came into being in the winter of 1991, when a coalition of local community activists, college students, and a Yale Law School student got together to organize and raise funds to begin a youth leadership initiative that pairs a college student and an inner-city high-school student with eight same-age, same-sex children between ages seven and fourteen. All of the children were from four of New Haven's poorest neighborhoods. LEAP started as a summer program where the two counselors spend three mornings a week, in a space donated by New Haven Public Schools, providing a reading-based academic enrichment curriculum to the children. The rest of the week is spent exposing them to our area's wonderful resources (museums, libraries, athletic facilities, camping, theaters, crafts, etc.), normally available only to middle-class families. In addition, LEAP groups finish the summer with a trip to Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Toronto, or Atlanta; for most children this is the first time they have been out of Connecticut. One unique aspect of LEAP is that the college counselors spend the summer living in public housing along with the children and remain in close contact with the children's families.
In September 1992 LEAP became a year-round program, and the same two counselors now meet with the same eight children for at least twelve hours a week during the academic year and again full-time in the summer. In less than five years LEAP has grown to serve more than seven hundred children in eight neighborhoods in three cities (Hartford and New London were added in June 1994) and has become an AmeriCorps program (President Clinton's Corporation for National and Community Service). LEAP's annual budget is now over $3,000,000. For the first year and a half, LEAP's staff and board met in our home. My wife and I (and our own children) had almost daily contact with the LEAP staff. Much of my time has been spent raising funds, helping to organize the administration and program, and working to make LEAP effective.
Like the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, one's impact or success as a social activist or child advocate is difficult to measure. Both take a long time, patience, the development of trust, and an unswerving belief that change can take place as the result of constant, principled, and informed pressure. Like a good psychoanalyst, a social activist has the moral obligation to tell the truth as he or she understands it. This isn't easy; finding the language, the context, and the probity to speak the truth is difficult and sometimes dangerous. However, without addressing the truth any positive or beneficial transformation is impossible. Neurosis and racism both try to capture a past that never was and not face a future that is inevitable.
Over time I began to notice similarities between an effective psychoanalyst and a good LEAP counselor. I've watched high-school and college students learn to speak the language of the children they work with and find out what is important to a particular child as a first step toward making a difference in that child's life. LEAP counselors who don't listen to their kids are dismal failures.
Speaking their language doesn't mean only using street talk; this would be stilted and artificial. A counselor has to speak to the child's experience and find a language that is an effective bridge between the two of them, between two worlds. It is the same in psychoanalysis. In each analysis (or psychoanalytic psychotherapy) a unique language develops and is shared between the analyst and patient. The language we create is not psychoanalytic textbook jargon, nor is it parroting the patient's speech. It is born of two people interested in each other who listen and struggle to understand. Some of the most successful LEAP counselors were initially the quietest, most reserved, who we initially thought we were taking a risk in hiring. They were good listeners.
The opposite has also been true: more than one counselor whose bravado was dazzling in the interview didn't make it past the first week. I think of my first psychoanalytic supervisor, Stan Leavy, author of The Psychoanalytic Dialogue, who repeatedly asked me “what did the patient say?” or of Hans Loewald in supervision telling me just to be quiet and listen, or of Sam Ritvo speaking of Paul Gray's recommendation to always approach the analytic material from the surface. Their advice is good for an analyst, a teacher, or a social activist. If you want to talk about teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases with a fourteen-year-old-kid from Church Street South, you had better first listen and understand her idiom.
I've noticed that many of LEAP's best counselors and staff are quite comfortable in two different worlds; they can hear, speak, and share the values of the inner-city ghetto and also be completely at home in a university classroom or talking about their work with the president of a bank. Is this really so different from the psychoanalyst's comfort in the realms of the primitive and the sophisticated? A seasoned
analyst is able to become fluent in the language of the primary and secondary processes or to understand different levels of meaning at the same time, to bridge or link latent and manifest content. Many of the best LEAP counselors and staff come from poor neighborhoods themselves. Several have parents from different racial and cultural backgrounds. Does this contribute to their ease in two different worlds? Is it analogous to a gifted psychotherapist who, having struggled with his or her own dark side, can feel relatively comfortable with regression?
Just as an interpretation can be seen as a translation from one realm or idiom to another, a college student working in the disenfranchised ghetto of Elm Haven or Westville Manor must be able make a translation between the child's world and the world outside. He shows the child that it is possible to get out, that there is hope and the possibility for education and mainstreaming that the child had not realized. LEAP, and all social programs for that matter, builds bridges. No child's universe should be confined and limited to a landscape of poverty and economic segregation, or to the turf claimed by a gang. Similarly, I often think about the analyst's task being the opening of new opportunities for understanding and action for the patient. There is choice; there are options. There are paths to a healthier, broader, and more satisfying life.
In a larger setting I have had the opportunity to listen to and read the works of contemporary activists for social change, such as Marion Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, or Jonathan Kozol, author of Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation and Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, who bring about social change by finding a way to speak truths that can be heard. They don't lecture; they inspire. A good teacher doesn't stand in front of a classroom of children and lecture to them or say, “Listen, I'm the captain of the ship—you either do what I say or you walk the plank.”
Effective teachers or leaders inspire by example; they are role models. I listened to how my analytic supervisors thought about process material, both what I brought to them and what they shared from their own work. A supervisor can't lecture to a candidate about how to conduct a psychoanalysis; both listen together to all sorts of material, from process notes to the casual talk at the beginning of the supervisory session (these casual interchanges outside of presenting analytic process are often more important in the development of the young analyst's identity and style of listening than is commonly recognized). Likewise, we can't preach to a child not to take drugs or not to join a gang, or to read a book or do their homework. We inspire them by listening to them, paying attention to them, appreciating what they have to say, and showing them by example. This is mentoring, not lecturing.
Impoverished children do not think about the difference between positive and negative role models; they hunger for attention and for any models. If the drug dealer or a gang member pays attention to them, they'll join up. A fourteen-year-old LEAP boy asked his new counselor how much money he made for a month's work, then said he could make that much in a day. The counselor couldn't enjoin him not to work for a drug dealer or lecture to him that the world isn't a violent place or that he shouldn't be hopeless or that what he watches on television isn't reality. He showed him—by caring and listening over time, by being there for the boy, by living in his neighborhood with him, literally and figuratively—that there is another way to look at oneself and the world. The young leader has to convey the satisfaction and nourishment that he gets from his work; it is not just a business operation.
“Like a good psychoanalyst, a social activist has the moral obligation to tell the truth.”
Successful analysts, too, convey their own satisfaction with the practice of psychoanalysis. It is worthwhile sometimes to substitute thought for action. Analysts don't succeed by telling the patient what to do or even by getting the analysand only to see things the analyst's way; instead they demonstrate that there are new and different ways to look at oneself and the world. The patient is then able to find his own way; and this is not necessarily the analyst's way (a common pitfall). Likewise, most of the time it is unrealistic for an inner-city fifth grade child whose reading skills are two years below grade level to expect to end up at Yale, or perhaps even Southern Connecticut State University like their counselor, but there are many new and better possibilities for that child. There are new ways for that child to understand the world and the transformative power of education and of language. That child can learn mainstream values and mainstream language from the counselor, and a universe of new possibilities will open up. Education (and the postponement of gratification that goes along with it) has been immensely satisfying for the student who becomes a LEAP counselor.
During my years with LEAP, as the young people running the program have gotten to know and trust me I have had the chance to use some of my medical and psychoanalytically informed psychiatric skills directly. Often I am asked medical questions or have the opportunity to make medical referrals. I have performed physical exams and filled out medical forms for LEAP staff and counselors. I've also had the chance to do some informal analytically informed teaching and supervision, especially in areas of developmental issues, age-appropriate interventions with children, and dealing with the emotional problems of some of the children and their families. I've been called at night and on vacation for advice on what to do about a child who runs away from an abusive home to their counselor's college dorm or to help with a group of counselors' rage and helplessness when one of them was assaulted.
My being trusted is an important part of the equation. This has taken time. The oldest staff member at LEAP is now twenty-seven; the average age is around twenty-three. When LEAP started, no one was older than twenty-three.
When we first began hiring counselors, I volunteered to sit in on some of the interviews. Reluctantly, the students conducting the interviews agreed to let me be in the room. I wanted to be there because I felt some responsibility for quality control and I had been conducting psychiatric interviews for years. Furthermore, I was curious about what the interviews would be like and excited by the prospect of collaborating with people half my age and being able to work in blue jeans. The twenty-three-year-old executive director of LEAP told me not to say anything and not to take notes during the interviews. I had no intention of taking notes. Was this a response to the stereotype of a psychoanalyst with his notepad and pen?
As we all know, youth are very wary of people a generation older. I didn't say anything in these early interviews and struggled to keep my mouth shut in the discussions that followed unless my opinion was sought. Sometimes I was able to discern some psychopathology, often character disorders, and share this with the other interviewers. Over time they got to know me. I sometimes led the interviews and sometimes interviewed prospective counselors by myself. The young staff realized I could be useful. In addition, my wife Roz and I would go out of our way to bring food to meetings, open our home to the LEAP staff, join in helping to stuff envelopes until three in the morning, clean up the office, praise good work, and, when possible, spend more time listening than talking. Intuitively we were modeling values and behavior for the staff, who would do the same for the senior counselors and on to the junior counselors, then for the children.
I began to realize that I am perceived as having two sometimes separate but satisfying identities. One is as Jerry the involved board member, volunteer, and friend. The other role is Jerry who happens to be a physician and a psychoanalyst. Some staff have approached me with their own psychiatric concerns, some with a question about a psychotropic medication or wanting a referral for themselves or a friend or family member. Often I am asked directly or indirectly for reassurance about a physical problem or a neurotic concern. Some of my most rewarding moments have resulted from being available for someone who is having an emotional crisis at work and being able to listen to them, comfort them, and help them see things from a different perspective. Once this literally did happen on the street—College Street, in fact.
Interestingly, I have been asked more than once by young men at LEAP about how I decided to get married and have children. They wanted to know what makes a marriage work. One of them asked my wife and myself, “I really want to be a father and have children, but how do you decide to get married?” How does one move on in life? I thought about reading Erikson's Identity and the Life Cycle as a candidate. It seemed more practical now than when I had first read it. If my psychoanalytic training and experience has been valuable at all, Jerry who happens to be a physician and psychoanalyst tries to hold back and listen while Jerry the enthusiastic board member, volunteer, and friend is sorely tempted to try to answer their questions.
Finally, my training and experience as a psychoanalyst have influenced how I view LEAP programmatically, especially in the areas of reading and cooperative learning. Every child in LEAP reads or is read to every day. The read-aloud program is at the heart of our academic component. Most of the children are rarely read to at home. Many come from single-parent households in which there are no books and little inclination or time to read to a child. When we interview prospective counselors, we ask them to read aloud. Some hold the books up to their noses; some hold the book so the child can see the pictures. A few read aloud in a way that insists on participation and connection between the reader and the child. We hire these applicants on the spot, because there is plenty of evidence that a child who is read to will eventually read.
Watching LEAP counselors read to the children has made me wonder about what happens when a loved one reads to a child. The spoken words from a book, because of the loving context in which they are read, become a significant comfort for the child, a sort of transitional phenomenon. Reading a book aloud and reading together can become an overdetermined positive experience. Children will learn to to comfort themselves and to identify with the beloved and idealized reader. Words in a book become a link between the security of being with the beloved reader and being alone. Using this insight, people at LEAP are working on ways to get all LEAP parents to read to their children. This is applied theory at its best.
(For references to material used in this article, contact the editor.)
Sallye Wilkinson is Special Section Editor for Psychoanalysis and the Inner City. A second part will appear in the next issue of TAP