Lillian Malcove, a supervising and training analyst at NYPSI, was an avid art collector. She amassed over 500 pieces of exquisite art from the Bronze Age, through the Medieval Period (primarily) to the Modern Era. It is possible that the chosen era of her collection was guided by her inclination to explore man's early history and her delight in detecting the source of her pieces. Drawing on Malcove's personal life, her work as a psychoanalyst and images from her collection, I argue that Malcove's choices as an art collector, consciously and unconsciously, reflected a deep wish to replace what she lost, a desire to satisfy a relationship appetite and a need to give to others.
Malcove was born in Mogilev, on the Dnieper River, just outside Kiev, on June 8, 1902, the fifth child in a family of nine children, two of whom died in infancy. The family, Jewish within a Russian Orthodox culture, left Russia in May 1905 when Lillian was three years old to escape pogroms and immigrated to Winnipeg, Manitoba. Malcove, living with her older sister due to family disagreements, worked to put herself through medical school and graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1925.
After recovering from tuberculosis, she moved to New York to train in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. A Canadian pioneer, she graduated from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1933 and became a training and supervising analyst in 1939. For many years, Malcove served on the educational committee and taught the course on Universal Fantasies. She only wrote three papers: “Bodily Mutilation and Learning to Eat” (The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1933) and a lengthy review of the work of Margaret Fries (Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1945). Renowned as a supervisor, in her third paper, she explored the supervisory experience in terms of the analyzing instrument and reflected her close association with Otto Isakower (Journal of the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, 1975).
As a supervisor, Malcove focused on the patient's unconscious material and taught the importance of tolerating uncertainty in clinical work. Several NYPSI psychoanalysts recounted how the experience of being supervised by her influenced them. Norman Margolis described Malcove as his best supervisor because she taught him “to find unconscious meaning in behavior”; Ted Jacobs noted how in her restrained and quiet manner she taught him to be “in touch with what was unavailable to the patient and to wait because analysis takes time and patience”; Francis Baudry commented that Malcove would “listen in a unique way to what was immediately happening, replay the session and organize it as a gripping narrative about the patient's self and life.”
In 1937 Malcove married Laszlo Ormos, a Hungarian director of documentary films, who died in 1947 from a heart attack. There were no children from the marriage, and after Ormos's death, besides her clinical work and teaching, Malcove focused her energy on her art collection, which was shared with only her closest friends.
Selections from the collection were used to illustrate my speculations about her inner world. An anthropomorphic head/amulet from the third millennium BC seemed to represent man's earliest attempts to protect himself, his family and possibly his tribe. This head seemed a most fitting choice for a psychoanalyst. Family groups, such as a 1945 Moore sculpture and funerary steles of children with parents, perhaps expressed an underlying desire for the family she might have wished for with Ormos. Families begin with a relationship illustrated in Malcove's collection by a 1538 Lucas Cranach the Elder painting of Adam and Eve. Other pieces may represent her unconscious maternal wishes. For example, she collected icons that portrayed the tender bond between mother and child. In one, Mary's head is inclined toward the figure of the Christ child. She does not look at him but her expression is introspective not unlike the position and attitude of an analyst towards her patient.
Beyond a deep wish to replace what she had lost or missed in her life, a desire to satisfy a relationship appetite and a need to give to others, there may be another deeper meaning to Malcove's collection. Malcove died in 1981 at the age of 79. During her life she endured the trauma of serious illness (tuberculosis, encephalitis and, in the end, cancer), as well as painful personal loss. Malcove's collection seems to have been a way for her to cope with trauma and loss. As well, the collection demonstrates her interest in historical origins, a quest for beauty and her human spirit.
It was important to Malcove that her collection remains intact. Why? Perhaps she was so identified with it that it came to represent her self. She did not want her collection—her self—to be fragmented. At her death, Malcove's generativity shone through when she bequeathed the collection to the University of Toronto to remain intact for others to learn from and to appreciate the history of art as well as its beauty, captured in The Malcove Collection. (A Catalogue of the Objects in the Malcove Collection of the University of Toronto)
Mary Kay O'Neil, Ph.D., is a supervising and training psychoanalyst with the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis, representative on the IPA Board, formerly director of the Quebec English Institute, member of the IPA Publications Committee and editorial board of the IJP.