Phillip Freeman is training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. For 15 years, Freeman addressed the Boston psychoanalytic community in an annual talk that followed the exploits of the local congregation of analysts, their theories, their practices, and their efforts to hold onto their dignity in the marketplace. The last 10 years of these talks were collected and published last year together with a CD of some of the performances. The collection, Adaptations: Disquisitions on Psychoanalysis 1997-2006, is available at Amazon.com. (See excerpt, page 32.)
VC: You have written a collection of funny serious talks about psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts. Is there something inherently funny about the discipline?
PF: As psychoanalysts, we are ripe for satire. Our best intentions make us so. Psychoanalysis, our theory, is a compassionate satire of our civilized pretensions. No one recognizes better than psychoanalysts the inevitable self-deceptions and hypocrisies that come from attempts to be better than ourselves, and the wish to be seen as lovable. We hold onto our truth a bit better as clinicians than as members of a group. We know, for example, that interpretations inevitably involve confrontations, that analysis includes a measure of seduction. But we still try to avoid the fact that every structure, from the cell membrane to the American Psychoanalytic Association involves distinctions, exclusions, and aggression.
VC: What is to be gained by your decision to consider controversies about the certification process in terms of the question of whether Clinton should have eaten the wafer at a communion service in South Africa?
PF: Psychoanalysts are the perfect audience for narrative weaves that tie disparate stories together through association and allusion, and flow towards resolutions that are strange and yet familiar. In listening to the interplay of the real and the imagined, the present and the transferential, we are attuned to displacement.
The book is a collection of love songs to a profession built on a creative explosion of ideas, launched into celebrity, shocked by passing fashion, and tempted by endless cosmetic strategies to recapture the past.
VC: Your discussions of Miracle Mike the Headless Chicken, the Totentanz death march, and the ominous ubiquity of dark matter in the universe might be taken as sounding a pessimistic note for the discipline. Are you hopeful?
PF: We have had a rise and a fall. What will be our third act? The book is a collection of love songs to a profession built on a creative explosion of ideas, launched into celebrity, shocked by passing fashion, and tempted by endless cosmetic strategies to recapture the past. What must we do to survive and what must we remember to survive what we would do?
VC: How does humor help?
PF: Freud exemplified and recognized the resiliency of humor. His ironic recommendation of the hospitality of the Gestapo exposed tyrannical authority—whether institutional or intrapsychic—as blind and therefore weak, perhaps vulnerable to interpretation. For a profession charged with the task of relieving analysands of their more expensive and expansive illusions, his belief in resilient humor strikes a note of optimism.
VC: One of your longer talks is built around the story of John Watson, father of American behaviorism. Why?
PF: Our aspirations to efficiency and interdisciplinary explorations in psychoanalysis sometimes lead to mischief.
VC: Did a monastery really close after an encounter with psychoanalysis in Guadalajara?
PF: History is always subject to interpretation. I think we can say that Guy Pinterra's efforts in that setting, if it existed, to develop a research methodology for psychoanalysis based on simulations anticipated by many years current trends in clinical education.
VC: In the preface to Adaptations you refer to our efforts to hold onto our dignity in the face of market forces. How do you think we are doing?
PF: I have heard that sometime between the Lorraine Bracco affair and the efforts to remove Freud's cigar from the APsaA logo there was a moment's pause for reflection.
VC: Is it all about money?
PF: Some of the more anagrammatic characters in the collection speak to this issue. I prefer to think it is all about trying to remember, on a particularly tricky day, where you left the keys. Or, perhaps it is all about wanting to be loved.
VC: I have recently reviewed your talks for American Imago and in that review end up wondering about your role as Shakespearean fool to the aging royalty of American psychoanalysis: Lear's fool came to an ambiguous
Vera J. Camden, Ph.D., is professor of English at Kent State University, training and supervising analyst at the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center, and co-editor of American Imago. She is a member of the Committee on Research and Special Training. Recently she published Trauma and Transformation (Stanford, 2007).
end when he tried to rescue his beloved king from self-destructive and narcissistic ruin. Care to comment?
PF: Psychoanalysts are typically portrayed as fools for presuming to know. Fools are sometimes allowed to act as psychoanalysts for presuming not to. It is, however, as you say, a dangerous business. There is enough room in humor to accommodate all manner of projected motives and fear. Still, when things are going well, there also is the more felicitous possibility of providing sanctuary.