Jazz, Psychoanalysis, and Revolution

When I first heard the title of our New Orleans meeting workshop “Jazz, Race, and Psychoanalysis,” some intensely personal reminiscences came to mind. The time was 1936–42, and the place was Chicago. I was a native son returning from an Eastern college to attend a local medical school, exploring the city with a new, more observant eye.

The link between jazz and psychoanalysis, along with Marxist socialism, then seemed obvious: All were revolutionary movements of the time. For me, Marxism, in its Popular Front guise, had come from college years of immersion in the lost Spanish Civil War. Freud was currently being transmitted by Lionel Blitzsten, who offered a series of seminars on analysis at Cook County Hospital. These meetings were open to students from all the medical schools in the city, held in a dark, catacomb-like room near the ob/gyn service. In Chicago jazz was everywhere, and super-alive, after our college years of assiduously collecting records of Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Teddy Wilson's trio with Billie Holliday. Our Bible was in French: Hugh Panassiés's Le Jazz Hot!

Young Purists

In retrospect, I realize that my friends and I were already cultists about “authentic” jazz as pure improvisation. We were generally opposed to the big band movement, although we listened selectively to individual performers like Lester Young, and we all loved Count Basic We were skeptical of Ellington as an arranger and composer, in contrast to the improvisation that we idealized in “pure jazz,” and we probably underestimated his originality. We later found similarities in the analytic method of free association and in the cultivation of the unconscious in art forms like Dadaism, surrealism and Japanese sumi painting. I also believed that jazz was an art form for listening, not dancing, a convenient belief because I was a shy and awkward dancer.

In Chicago we found jazz not in the big ballrooms but in small, dark, basement clubs in the black neighborhood on the South Side, where musicians from New Orleans like Johnnie Dodds played dreamy clarinet improvisations like 'Deep Creek.“ The atmosphere was not unlike Blitzsten's ”cell“ at Cook County, with three to five musicians at most, often just piano, drums and Dodds's incredible clarinet, with a few couples at tables around a small dance floor. Because my two friends were musicians, occasionally invited to sit in with the band, we felt warmly welcomed; we had escaped the color line.

Besides the South Side jazz clubs, there was a club under Wacker Drive called the Three Deuces, where Roy Eldridge played trumpet and Dodds's brother “Baby” played the drums. Chicago also abounded in itinerant boogie-woogie piano players, some famous like Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis, others more obscure, like Pine-Top and Crippled Clarence Lofton. There were also shops on South State Street, selling “Race Records” of Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Leadbelly and other famous blues singers. Leadbelly performed at Harvard, introduced by Alan Lomax.

We were only dimly aware of the racial discrimination implicit in the tradition of all-white and all-black bands. I, for one, failed to recognize Benny Goodman's bold innovation in creating his trios and quartets, with Teddy Wilson, Billie Holliday, and Lionel Hampton playing and singing together with Goodman and Gene Krupa. This naïveté may have derived from our having heard so much of our jazz on records; even in later years I was never quite sure whether Miles Davis and Stan Getz were black or white.

Sudden Awareness

A rude awakening to the color line came later, when my wife and I were traveling from the Lawson General School of Military Psychiatry in Atlanta to our base in El Paso. We were traveling with a black colleague from the school, and when we stopped to change trains in New Orleans, no taxi driver would take us all to the next station. I became indignant, but our tactful colleague explained the facts of life and excused himself to find a black taxi driver. My recollection of military hospitals is that patients were segregated only in southern states, not elsewhere, including aboard ships and in the South Pacific.

When I began analytic training in Boston after the war, two of some fifteen fellow candidates were black, but their number has not increased. The Boston Psychoanalytic Institute now has only one black member. This unexpected falling off of black participation in Boston, in contrast to the increase in women analysts, has no obvious explanation. I headed for New Orleans hoping to learn more from this workshop about institutes in other cities.

I have omitted another revolutionary experience during medical school: a journal club during my third-year clerkship at Colorado Psychopathic Hospital that was devoted to psychoanalytic literature. The group was led by a remarkable resident, David Morgan, whose pro-Freudian program was explicitly subversive, opposing the prevailing psychobiology of Adolf Meyer propagated by our chief, Franklin Ebaugh. I was also influenced by a small book called, I think, Psychoanalysis, or the Wish to Fall Ill, by Karen Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf. Finally, in an overseas military station, I found a congenial colleague with a copy of Fenichel's The Psychoanalytic Theory of the Neuroses, like a precious, contraband book. I devoured it during many tropic nights in Manila and thus completed my preparation for becoming an analyst.

These fond recollections may seem too personal or too remote to be useful, after all the changes in analysis during the past sixty years. But I doubt that I was the only one drawn to analysis by its revolutionary qualities. It was a “movement,” like jazz, like Cubism, like Marxism, like the poetry of Auden and Spender. As Wordsworth said of the French Revolution, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”