On October 30, 2009, The Michigan Psychoanalytic Foundation hosted its 25th Annual Benefit. Marvin Margolis was honored. Excerpts from the award speech follow.
Marvin Margolis, the man we honor tonight has achieved every top position in the world of American psychoanalysis: president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, chairman of the Board of Professional Standards, and chairman of the Ethics Committee, as well as receiving the Sigourney Award for distinguished contributions to psychoanalysis worldwide. Tonight I would like to talk about our local “Michigan Marvin” and how he has influenced us here.
A perfectionist in his own work, yet he is infinitely kind and encouraging to others in theirs.
I have known him since the late 1960s, as a psychology graduate student who came to the Detroit Psychiatric Institute, and I was one of the many “Marvin-mentored,” and “Marvin-supported,” sharing with him our passion for psychoanalysis and encouraged by him into becoming a psychoanalyst at a time when it was not supported nationally, and cajoled into taking on organizational tasks, participating actively at every level in every venue.
An incredibly generous man with his time and resources, Marv showed the way by offering to co-teach and to co-chair committees—in a word, to share. Clearly his methods have gone a long way toward creating the vital psychoanalytic community and high energy ambiance we enjoy here. He has that capacity to take a project and give it his all. A perfectionist in his own work, yet he is infinitely kind and encouraging to others in theirs. But cross him in a mean-spirited way and out can come the iron fist from his velvet glove. Here is some history that I learned as I talked with him about his development.
Coming from a Labor Zionist home, with loving immigrant parents, he attended Hebrew school five days a week. How we analytic types love anything five days a week! Marv characterizes his father as a good man with good values, a man who had a major influence on him. Finding Marv one day crying (having been bullied and somewhat beaten up), his father got him a boxing teacher who taught him to defend himself. Thus the attitude. There is always a way to work out problems, you don't give up. Work around or through obstacles.
Marv wanted to go to Israel to be a pioneer and live in a collective settlement. So, in his late teens, he quit the University of Michigan and went to a training farm in New Jersey for 18 months and took courses in agriculture at Rutgers. He was supposed to leave the country on one of the illegal boats to pick up refugees from the concentration camps, run the British blockade, and take them to Palestine. But Habonim, the organization to which he belonged at that time, decided that he was one who should temporarily stay behind to do educational work in the youth movement. With his recognized inclination as an educator, he was chosen for a three-year stint in Chicago where he learned his organizational skills.
Marv said, “When I quit school to work for the cause, I did something my father was totally against, but he supported me. He even flew to Chicago and hired a secretary to do some of the organizational work I was doing so I could attend university. Clearly he was determined to help me, wherever I would be.” Sound familiar?
Marv told me that families asked his father to mediate between warring factions in personal as well as business affairs; friends trusted him. Here is a clear link with Marv's own interests and talents in dealing with ethical problems and impaired colleagues, allowing him to exercise his skills in negotiating and consultation and mediating between factions.
When Marv returned to college he majored in sociology and anthropology. Still planning to settle in Israel, as a teacher on a kibbutz, he became interested in utopian societies, urban renewal, and sociologist Emile Durkheim. Ultimately becoming disenchanted with socialism and kibbutz communal living; he decided to pursue a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. This was with the idea of doing psychotherapy to help people fulfill themselves as individuals. His master's thesis was on alienation in the urban environment and his doctorate was on the nature of the mother-child relationship where the child has bronchial asthma. Reading Freud, being in treatment, getting supervision, it became clear to him that his goal was to be a psychoanalyst. Since at that time the only way to become a psychoanalyst was through a medical degree and a psychiatric residency, he did it. Unlike others whose attitudes are “I had a tough time—you can too!” Marv has worked diligently to see that others don't have to go through all he did in order to become psychoanalysts. Marv clearly identified through his parents with an immigrant community which at times feels excluded, unappreciated, and often resentful, just as he felt excluded as a graduate student from participating in what was a closed psychoanalytic organization. He said, “Can you imagine, I couldn't even come into a meeting to hear a scientific paper?”
Deanna Holtzman, Ph.D., is a former chair of CORST, training and supervising analyst at the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute (MPI) where she chairs Academic Programs. She is president of Sigmund Freud Archives and serves on the faculty of Wayne State University.
Organizationally for Marv there is a “big picture” of where he wants to be, and where he wants us to be, with him. His interests went from his master's thesis of alienation in society to alienation of colleagues and candidates from local as well as national institutes. Marv has sought to change the structure of psychoanalytic organizations with the notion that elitism and authoritarianism are detrimental for nurturing individuals and for encouraging development. What he has tried to promote here in Michigan is a healthy institute with supportive communities around it; there is always an emphasis on building group relations. Not a naïve “nicifier,” (someone who makes and thinks everything can be nice) and aware of the potential for dark and evil, yet his optimistic focus is on the potential for love, friendship, creativity, and commitment.
Quiet a good deal of the day, most of us psychoanalysts are bursting to talk and to be heard at meetings. Marv quotes Vaclav Havel with admiration, “We must try harder to understand than to explain.” And so our Marv listens intently to understand by letting all talk without interruption, and then comments with an articulate incisiveness.
I feel privileged and am so delighted to have this opportunity to talk a little bit about Marv. When he asked me to introduce him, he did make one request, he said, “Don't talk about that old boring saw of my calling people late at night, it's not true any more.” So believe me, I am not going to mention it, even though it has stood as the recognizable marker of someone who is devotedly working, who perseveres and does not give up until a job is done and done well.
Are you all aware that Marv is the king of PMS? What is that you ask? Political Mastery Skills. Are there new ideas? Difficult to gain approval at the Executive Committee? Marv is “the architect of the pilot study.” So new and creative programs are started without our usual sturm and drang. Marv says, “Let's do a pilot study and report back in a year.” He calls it “Taking baby steps.” These baby steps have helped our psychoanalytic community to make giant leaps, to be the most vibrant analytic organization doing more analytic work than all of the others.
The essence of what Marvin stands for is democratization. His axiom is “Psychoanalysis like America grows by inclusion.” Thus his goal has been, and continues to be, how to bring psychoanalytic organizations out of the desert of inflexibility and exclusion and into the promised land of openness, flexibility, and strength, without losing or giving up what is valuable in our past. Thus he has actively supported training for psychologists, women, African-Americans, homosexuals, social workers, younger applicants, interdisciplinary applicants, and academics of every persuasion, and has endorsed candidate representation on committees, and meaningful governance positions for all faculty. He has championed outreach to various groups in the community at large, including Orthodox Jews, Southeast Asians, Catholics, Arabs, and others. Desiring a place for non-analysts who want to support analysis, he helped us create a viable foundation, using the energy of others allied with us to work together to make our psychoanalytic tribe larger and heterogeneously stronger Marv lives the Talmudic dictum: If you save one life you save the world. He will go to the ends of the earth—and the evening—(you should pardon the expression, Marv) to sustain any one individual who is needing help, be it friend, candidate, colleague or analysand. He is a consensus builder with creative ideas, a visionary full of hope, a humanist with humility.
And in the end, he is always there to share a good dinner, a movie, or concert and a hearty laugh, to enjoy life fully with his wife and dear companion Tami, with family and with friends. And so we say to Marvin, continue on: L'Chaim—to life!