The plenary speaker at the Annual Meeting of The American this May in San Diego will be Evelyne Albrecht Schwaber. Born in Vienna, Schwaber lived there for six months after Hitler annexed Austria before she was able to escape with her family to Switzerland. She was separated from her parents for a time, entered a Kinderheim run by nuns and then a foster home until she could be reunited with her parents. In May 1940, the reunited family was able to obtain the necessary papers to establish a new life in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, along with many other refugees from fascism. She had already decided as a child in Vienna that she wanted to become a medical doctor.
Quick to establish roots in this country, Schwaber attended public school in Brooklyn, skipped a grade, and entered Radcliffe College at age sixteen. There, while taking her pre-med courses, she majored in music, foreshadowing her lifelong interest in the subtleties of listening. Her dissertation topic was César Franck's Symphony in D-minor. “What interested me,” she said, “was the way the instrumental voices play off — and with — each other. Yes, my interest was in the interplay of voices.”
Schwaber was one of the first three women who entered the first class of fifty students at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. She married Jules Schwaber, a Cornell medical student, and after her pediatric internship at Einstein, the young couple began their family. Here, too, Schwaber was a pioneer. She broke new ground for women in being able to arrange for herself a part-time residency program in adult and child psychiatry, with the indispensable support of Milton Rosenbaum and José Barchilon in New York and Erich Lindemann in Boston. She trained in adult psychiatry at Einstein and at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and then in child psychiatry at the James Jackson Putnam Children's Center, Boston City Hospital and the Douglas Thorn Clinic, part-time for eight years. Schwaber has served even more than she knows as a role model for professional women. In her own life, she has paved the way by showing modern women that it is possible to be fully committed to family and career.
At the Boston City Hospital, she joined the staff as liaison psychiatrist to the pediatric service. In that capacity, she was instrumental again as a pioneer in gaining permission from the hospital administration for parents to sleep in the same room with their hospitalized children. Also, at “the City,” the young Schwaber met Louis Sander and came into contact with his infant research on the nuances of psychophysiological state. She was moved and inspired by a case involving a “failure-to-thrive” infant in which Sander's attention to the changing patterns of sleeping and waking state proved life-saving.
Careful listening to the nuances of shifts of affective and state and exploring their meaning has been one of the hallmarks of Schwaber's work. After completing her psychoanalytic training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, where Elvin Semrad was her training analyst, she joined the faculty there and at the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East, where since 1983 she has served as a training and supervising analyst.
Her remarkable career as a psychoanalytic writer began early with the publication in 1977 in the International Review of Psycho-Analysis of a paper based on her work with an analytic control patient supervised by Robert Gardner. Since then, she has edited one book and has over forty publications on her signature interest in aspects of analytic listening. Many of her writings have been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. She has been visiting analyst in many parts of the world, including Australia, South America, Europe, and Israel. Highly sought after as a teacher, she has conducted workshops and provided supervision in places too numerous to mention. Of these, most notable is her discussion group on “Analytic Listening: Reflections on Hypothesis and Evidence,” which has been a valued part of the program at meetings of The American since 1979.
Schwaber's honors have included the Journal Prize of JAPA for her 1986 paper: “Reconstruction and Perceptual Experience: Further Thoughts on Psychoanalytic Listening” and the Samuel G. Hibbs Award of the American Psychiatric Association for the best paper on a clinical subject: “Psychoanalytic Theory and its Relation to Clinical Work” . In addition, she accepted the honor of giving a Freud Memorial Lecture at the University of London in 1988.
Schwaber's major contributions in the area of analytic listening have been original, influential, controversial. She summarizes the essence of her goal simply, but what she teaches is far from simple. She states: “There is so much more to which we can listen … if only we would.” Schwaber continues to ask each analysand: “What is your experience? Is there something I am not hearing or understanding about your point of view?” Simultaneously, she questions herself. With integrity, courage, and honesty, she constantly seeks to learn whether feelings or assumptions of her own stand in the way of hearing her patient's point of view. And, finally, with gentle but uncompromising firmness, Schwaber challenges all of us working in the field of psychoanalysis to ask, listen to the answer, and not assume we've heard.
Lawrence Friedman noted, “Dr. Schwaber's approach too often has been patronized as a nice-nice avoidance of conflict and aggression in treatment. She does avoid struggles of reform and persuasion — and that is certainly welcome. But I think her approach is the opposite of appeasement — in many respects it is the most tough-minded of all treatment approaches.”
When we hear her plenary address, Schwaber will move us by what she says about analytic listening and will inspire us to think more deeply about the continuous interplay between our personal experience and our work. Her address is entitled: “‘Traveling Affectively Alone’: A Personal Derailment in Analytic Listening.”
Axel Hoffer is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East.