[On June 15, 2001, Irwin Rosen presented some personal remarks at the Menninger Graduation-Reunion Farewell Weekend in Topeka, Kan., just a few weeks after the announcement of the closing of the Topeka Institute and the Menninger Clinic. His remarks are excerpted here with permission from the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, Vol. 66, No. 4, Fall 2002, where Rosen's address was published in its entirety.]
These remarks are both the hardest thing I have ever had to write and one of the most healing. So many emotions and thoughts swept over me so swiftly these past weeks that it was hard to sustain any one affect for very long without it being elbowed aside by some other equally intense feeling or memory. Pride, sadness, gratitude, anger, love, loss, hope, and accomplishment all shifted rapidly within me into different shapes and patterns like the bits of glass in a turning kaleidoscopic lens.
The kaleidoscope experience, though, gradually gave way to something more like a Polaroid photograph, as one group of memories emerged and their image sharpened of what all of us—this treasured group of teachers, students, and colleagues—have created and accomplished in our years together. A single very recent memory captures and contains an array of past and current feelings.
I wish that you all could have been with me at about 11:00 a.m. in New Orleans on May 2, 2001, at the meeting of the Board on Professional Standards of the American Psychoanalytic Association, where I was representing our Institute (the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis). Dr. Ronald Benson, now chairman of the Board, told the members about our closing, recalling Topeka's outstanding gifts of service, of scholarship, of research, of leadership, of innovative and exemplary training. Then he stopped. For a moment there was the sad silence of the sinking in of reality, and then this usually reserved, undemonstrative group of men and women leaped to their feet and erupted into a long, sustained, thunderous ovation for us all.
I accepted the laudatory certificate that had been prepared for our institute and could only say that grateful as I was on behalf of all of us, I would have given anything for that event not to have had to happen. Later, once my composure had been regained, I could acknowledge to myself how very much we had given over six decades for that group to cheer about, and how well deserved their ovation for us had been.
Our institute is fifty-nine years old, the sixth oldest in the country. We were the first institute west of the Mississippi, and we pioneered psychoanalytic training in the entire western half of the country. We sponsored the beginnings of analysis in California, which makes us the parent or grandparent or great-grandparent of a brood of training centers that has continued to grow and thrive. From Topeka, either as institute or KMSP [Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry] alumni, have come six presidents of the American Psychoanalytic Association—Drs. Karl and Will [Menninger], Robert Knight, Robert Wallerstein, Richard Simons, and George Allison. Bob Wallerstein and Otto Kernberg served, as well, as presidents of the International [Psychoanalytical Association]. In 1966, the Association for Child Psychoanalysis held its first meeting here in Topeka, with Anna Freud as its keynote speaker. A decade later, our institute director, Ishak Ramzy, served as president of that organization.
So much good, so much enduring good came from so small a place. Just as Dr. Karl's The Human Mind first introduced modern psychiatric ideas to a wide American audience, Dr Will's “Guide to the Order Sheet” in the late 1930s first brought a psychoanalytic rationale to psychiatric hospital treatment. The work of David Rapaport and his colleagues Roy Schafer, Merton Gill, and Martin Mayman changed the practice of psychodiagnostic testing forever. From Topeka in the late 1960s came Otto Kernberg's groundbreaking work on borderline conditions.
From Topeka also came the landmark writings of Herb Schlesinger and Phil Holzman on perceptual and cognitive ego styles, and of Howard Shevrin on brain wave correlates of unconscious mental processes. Later on came the decades-long Psychotherapy Research Project, directed first by Bob Wallerstein and then by Otto Kernberg, which produced more than seventy publications, including five books. In the 1980s, Len Horwitz and a group of institute colleagues extended the work into a study of the treatment of patients with borderline disorders….
The Mary S. Sigourney Award for Outstanding Contributions to Psychoanalysis has gone to [seven of] our alumni…. Sigourney awards are also given to organizations, and in 1998 the Menninger Clinic itself was awarded that prestigious honor. The award recognized Menninger's generous support of its institute, one that created a synergistic arrangement in which, in turn, the institute helped provide and prepare generations of clinical, educational, and research leadership at Menninger Adapting Winnicott's observation that mother and baby cannot be separated from their psychological unity, so too our institute could not, did not, survive without Menninger It is equally difficult to imagine that Menninger would have attained its matchless historic, international preeminence absent its institute.
Most important, though, Menninger was the birthplace and home of a vision, the passionately shared conviction that the suffering of our patients bore meaningful internal links to hidden and continuous patterns within the events of their lives; and that in multidisciplinary teams we could bring compassion and understanding to help our patients regain mastery of the dark
Irwin Rosen, Ph.D., was approaching his fiftieth year at Menninger's when the Topeka Institute closed. He was a training and supervising analyst at the Topeka Institute and directed the outpatient department and the department of psychotherapy at the Menninger Clinic. He is currently a training and supervising analyst at the Greater Kansas City Psychoanalytic Institute.
and fearsome inner forces that had temporarily overwhelmed them. We built a hospital, a clinic, a school, a psychoanalytic institute, a research department that all working in synchrony would strive to teach and learn, discover and refine, apply, use, and disseminate what grew in the exciting intellectual ferment that was Topeka.
As psychiatry broadened, a “Menninger model of treatment” emerged that although psychodynamically based included biological, family, cognitive, and psychoeducational approaches in its clinical services. From such a uniquely productive relationship among clinic, institute, school, and research activity came a cascade of thrilling ideas and programs over a sixty-year time span in which all of us participated together during our time here.
Together, then, we built a remarkable place here, one that we never thought would close its doors in our lifetime.
Such was the vision. The British philosopher Isaiah Berlin once asked, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, who can build anything straight?” We all know that our mutual efforts were not unmarred by intermittent, memorably sharp conflict and disagreement. We were, after all, a community of professionals, not a congregation of saints. But far and away, for the most part Menninger and its institute made the vision work to the lasting benefit of our patients, of our students, and of a wider professional audience that read of and learned from the work that had been pioneered in Topeka. For that, we cannot let this important historical moment pass without expressing our heartfelt and respectful gratitude to Roy and Walt Menninger for standing steadfastly with us, especially during those lean and difficult years when psychodynamically based treatment programs declined in popularity and in financial support throughout the country….
Together, then, we built a remarkable place here, one that we never thought would close its doors in our lifetime.
Tonight and this weekend, with barely tolerable sadness, we say goodbye to each other and with almost indecent pride we celebrate having shared a place that allowed each of us, together, to be and to do far more than any of us could have been and done alone.
We are scattering to Houston, Kansas City, Portland, Atlanta, St. Louis, San Francisco, and possibly other places. As we have been approaching our closing, we have exchanged images to capture the spirit of our departure. The prevailing metaphors (among Jewish and Christian colleagues alike) are those of Diaspora and of Anatevka. My earlier ancestors participated in one, and my father was born in a village much like the latter, and I have learned a little about the process. Diasporas, it turns out, are not for the faint of heart or of purpose, nor especially for the shaky of identity.
Tonight I have recalled (I hope for all of us) many of those fine and enduring memories that secure our proud and honored historical identity as we prepare to accept the loss of this beloved and inimitable place. But ours is a psychoanalytic perspective rich in understanding the inner reverberations of loss and of the importance of that process in human life.
Even before the words “object relations” were ever used, Freud told us in “The Ego and the Id” and “Mourning and Melancholia” that through internalization and identification we become what we have lost….
Tonight I have briefly tried to remind us of the unique and wonderful place and history and tradition that we have built and shared. The loss is painful, the mourning difficult. The way now to perpetuate what we built together is to carry with us internally the place, the people, and what we did here, to re-create what we have learned here and keep it alive, and to practice and teach it afresh in our consulting rooms, our classrooms, and our writings.
On that premise, our institute and its parent, the Menninger Clinic, will live in our lives and in the lives of all those patients and students whom we will ever touch.
In that way, to paraphrase training analyst Humphrey Bogart of the Casablanca Institute for Psychoanalysis, “We'll always have Topeka.”