In his uniquely trenchant style, Robert Michels, a plenary speaker at The American's Fall Meeting, will examine “The Case History.” Condensing as it must the patient's life, the analysis, and the analyst's representation of these to his colleagues, the case history is the foundation of psychoanalysis. This narrative form, lying somewhere between art and science, is at the core of our field.
Michels is an acknowledged leader in psychoanalysis and psychiatry. His critical incisiveness and wide-ranging intellectual interests have been influential in our field for so long that you would expect him to be a quite a bit older than he is (he's 61). In 1971, with Roger MacKinnon, he wrote The Psychiatric Interview in Clinical Practice, a classic text that brought psychoanalytic understanding to psychiatric education. He has also written on many dimensions of mental life and on what informs the ways we understand things.
Connecting all his writings — whether on psychoanalytic theory and practice, medical and psychiatric education, or ethics and social issues — is a passion to reveal the inner nature, the deep structures, the hidden meanings and implications, of what we think, feel, and do. Michels alleges that as a youngster he wanted to be a mailman so that he could read other people's mail. Perhaps a more remarkable story about him, and one he tells with evident irony, is that he did not speak at all until he was four years old. His family worried that he might be retarded. Perhaps he was simply waiting because he assumed he was the invited discussant of what had been going on.
When he entered the University of Chicago at age 15, he intended to study mathematics and philosophy. However, the nature of the mind and the world of neuroscience captured his imagination, and with a research career in mind he went to medical school at Northwestern University, then residency in psychiatry at Columbia-PI. He underwent analytic training at Columbia Psychoanalytic Center and a stint in Washington at NIMH doing research with Seymour Kety on thyroid while taking courses at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. Coming back to New York, he became director of residency training first at St. Lukes-Roosevelt, then at Columbia-PI.
In 1974, Michels was named Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Barklie McKee Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College. He transformed Cornell's Department of Psychiatry into a psychoanalytically informed academic department. In 1991, he became Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean and Provost for Medical Affairs at Cornell. Most recently, leaving the deanship, he became Walsh McDermott University Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell (where, he says, his job is to think great thoughts and contribute to the betterment of humankind). He serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Psychiatry, the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and the New England Journal of Medicine, and is the chairman of the editorial board of the textbook Psychiatry.
A master dissectionist, a deconstructionist par excellence of complex questions and problems, Michels has been a most highly valued and sought consultant, educator, and wise counsel to individuals and to disciplines. Never shy about his views, he can be counted upon to be clear, rigorous, definitive and honest — and, if the situation warrants it, very funny.
As his plenary address will demonstrate, Michels is at heart a teacher. He wants us to understand our (implicit and explicit) relationship to theories — how we use them and they use us — and the ambiguous and ambivalent slave/master relationship that so often develops, particularly in psychoanalysis.
The place of psychoanalysis within psychiatry has always been a central interest to Michels; he has a particular concern for the ways in which they inform and influence each other. He is a current candidate for President of the American Psychiatric Association, and both psychiatry and psychoanalysis are well served by having him in a leadership position.