Lessons Learned from the Cleveland Dispute

In the last issue of TAP, Jacob Arlow, who chaired the Board on Professional Standards during a serious rift in the Cleveland Institute, wrote a commentary on Gary Waltz's article “Growing Pains in the Cleveland Institute” [TAP 32/1]. Drawing upon his experience during this difficult time, Arlow reflects upon dynamic issues common to controversies within the analytic community.

In my farewell address as Chairman of the Board on Professional Standards, I gave a detailed and perhaps an overly long presentation of some of the conclusions that I drew, both from the experience with the Cleveland Institute and in my other offices, that pertained to psychoanalytic education. I would like to share some of the lessons that can be learned from the painfully recurring turmoil that surfaces time and again in the history of psychoanalytic institutes. To quote from that farewell address:

“As in all matters psychoanalytic, transference is central. In the face of such sincere, albeit vehement dedication to psychoanalysis, it is striking to observe how regularly gross contamination of the transference relationship long antedates the crisis which erupts in the institutes. The tension in the Education or Administrative Committee is inevitably sensed and transmitted to the students. They become passionate partisans of one side or the other. The impact of such an experience on their subsequent development can hardly be beneficial. The same is true for those members who are not part of the faculty who inevitably become involved in the disputes. When the crisis finally breaks, the precipitating event usually concerns the problem of selection or election — election in the sense of admission to the elite. The particular issue may be who is appointed training analyst or member of the Educational Committee, who is retired, which applicant is accepted, which problem candidate is graduated or dropped. ‘Convoy’ problems, as described by Greenacre, often figure in the background.” (She was referring to how certain favored candidates can be protegés of a powerful, influential training analyst who guides and protects the candidates through the course of their training and subsequent career, much as troopships are convoyed by fighting vessels during war.)

“While the debate may be carried out on the level of theoretical or technical principles, the ultimate alignments are determined by residues of transference, friendly or hostile. This conclusion was reached in connection with these problem areas by several committees of the Board. Analogous observations were made in other situations by Anna Freud, Michael Balint, Robert Waelder, and Robert Bak. Sigfried Bernfeld implied as much in his writings on psychoanalytic education and the institutes.

“A neurosis, as we know, is based on one or more specific unconscious conflicts from childhood. These conflicts are organized in coherent form in terms of unconscious fantasies.

“While the debate may be carried out on the level of theoretical or technical principles, the ultimate alignments are determined by residues of transference, friendly or hostile.”

These fantasies are vehicles for some unconscious childhood wish or need. Derivatives of these fantasies may be seen in neurotic symptoms, in transference, and in acting out behavior. A special form of unconscious fantasy, when shared by many individuals who have identical, unconscious, affective needs and then project them onto some heroic figure, is the essence of myth. Myths, spoken or unspoken, infiltrate the ideology of the group, contributing an unconscious affective tie, which binds together the members of the group in terms of mutual identification. Institutionalized practices representing dramatic reenactment of some version of the myth (or unconscious fantasy) constitute what is commonly called ritual.

“Of the childhood conflicts which figure prominently in the transference neuroses of candidates, I have found two sets of derivative fantasies to be of special significance. The first of these concerns the wish to kill the much-envied and admired father in order to appropriate from him the phallus, purveyor of magical omnipotence. In the learned professions, omniscience is the instrumentality of boundless power. In analysis, Freud is the ultimate source. The mythological expressions corresponding to these wishes are many. They may be typified in the figures of Moses and Prometheus, both of whom reach up on high and come down with the symbol of all-powerful knowledge. Moses gets it as a gift on condition of submission and obedience; the appropriate ritual for this version of the myth is the initiation rite, whose function is to preserve and transmit the priceless heritage of the law. Prometheus steals it; he is the tragic rebel who is punished. The appropriate ritual for this version of the myth is the totem feast and all of its civilized equivalents as described by Sidney Tarachow. We know from Freud the essential ambivalence of ritual, despite the subsequent remorse, idealization, and deification of the father figure. Overidealization is the opposite side of the coin of hostility. In the transference, when such overidealization is foisted on to the analyst, it is usually, though not always, dealt with effectively. On the other hand, when such transference notions are transferred onto psychoanalysis as a method or a body of knowledge whose limitations may be obscure to the candidate — or to Freud, whose genius is universally unquestioned — the situation may be much more difficult to deal with. Such ideas conform so closely to what we feel and know to be true that it is easy to miss the transference implications. The possibility is left open, therefore, for the persistence of ambivalent transference residue. By way of reaction formation, the underlying doubt, as Theodore Reik pointed out, gives way to dogmatism. The stronger the repressed ambivalence, the greater the dogmatism. A remark ascribed to Herman Nunberg undoubtedly tells the truth when it warns against those who feel it their mission to rescue psychoanalysis.

“The trends mentioned above, whose implications have only been hinted at, are intensified by the effects of another fantasy complimentary to the first. It is the most widespread and most easily demonstrable of fantasies. I refer to the family romance. As a group, psychoanalysts are recruited from the ranks of the middle class, liberal, intellectual stratum of our society. For the most part, they have put behind them any sense of identification with family, religion, or national group. They demean their origins. Psychoanalysis serves as the family romance of psychoanalysts. I am sure I must have missed this connection several times until it was called to my attention by a candidate. As it happened, his life situation and childhood neurosis was so closely interwoven with a family

romance pattern that he was able to sense the pattern with striking clarity. How often, for example, have we heard from the couch something similar to the following:

“‘Until I came into analysis with you (or until I was really advanced in my psychoanalytic studies) my horizons were narrow. I had no outlook on the world. Things made no sense, no connections for me. My parents were ignorant, narrow minded, uneducated, uncultured, religious, old-fashioned, etc., etc. What my teachers, or even my psychiatry professors (non-analytic, of course) taught me pales into nothingness compared to analysis. In you, or in Dr. X, and especially in Freud, I have someone whom I can follow, whom I can emulate, admire — someone with whom I can maintain an everlasting connection.’ And so on. It is hard to resist such flattery, or to rebuff with interpretation a future colleague, so ready to espouse the cause. To continue our fictional analysis, one can anticipate the training analyst preparing his next report on the candidate. ‘Dr. X has made remarkable progress of late. His professional personality is emerging. He is completely identified with psychoanalysis. I think he is entering the phrase of termination, and I look forward to his developing into a dedicated and devoted psychoanalyst.’

“The family romance, like the other fantasies, indicates ambivalence. The elevated teacher and the degraded teacher — like their counterparts, the parental figures — are, after all, two aspects of the same object, one good and one bad. Sooner or later the unanalyzed hostility, cemented by group alliances with like-minded individuals, are projected onto the ‘them.’ The displacement from father to analyst to Freud is missed. The ‘enemy of analysis,’ really a repudiated aspect of the self, is attacked and, in the name of defending Freud, the unresolved transference bond to the father-analyst is pursued with a vigor and intensity that reveal its unconscious origin. The extrapolation involved in such interpretation may seem extreme and unfounded, but it was clear time and time again to committee after committee whose responsibility was to look into such problems for this Board.”

Now, many years later, things seem to have worked out quite well in Cleveland. For this we can all be grateful. If all the facts are presented and kept in mind, there are many useful lessons to be learned from the experience of the Cleveland Institute.