An Interview with Bob Winer: Master Builder Creating Functioning Families

BS: Bob, you have been responsible for creating so many innovative programs at the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis and the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. One motive for this interview is to promulgate your ideas nationally and even internationally. What got you interested in becoming a master builder?

BW: Two analyses later, I have some ideas about this. The central story of my childhood was that my father had rheumatic fever in the days before penicillin. His heart valves gradually rotted out, and it wouldn't be unfair to say he spent the first 11 years of my life dying. Without my consciously knowing a thing about that. I guess we were walking on thin ice in the melting season. He went to work every day, but his youngest brother, a doctor, said by the end my dad couldn't walk a block without angina. I remember a family picture in which my dad was grimacing. The toll on my mother was tremendous. I remember her crying if he was late coming home, fearing the worst. And then, out of nowhere, one night he fell to the bathroom floor and died.

But I didn't understand this for a very long time, and I've spent my life, time and again, trying to create families.

In my work with separating couples, I sometimes tell them it isn't helpful to tell their children that even though their mommy and daddy can't live together, they'll still be their kids' mommy and daddy, that won't change. It's not helpful, because something is being denied that needs to be acknowledged—the family is lost. I think my sense of family was desolated when my father died, not through any of our faults. There was an attempt to compensate with a big investment in our extended family, but it wasn't the same. But I didn't understand this for a very long time, and I've spent my life, time and again, trying to create families.

BS: How did that contribute to creating new families?

BW: In college in a course on mental health, I and a small group of classmates spent four days living separately as patients on wards of a state mental hospital (the kind that had 2000 totally tranquilized chronic schizophrenic patients overseen by three psychiatrists, one of whom spoke competent English). That experience empowered us to create one of the first halfway houses in America, Wellmet Project, and, while still undergraduates, we lived with patients from that hospital in this home. I ran it for half a year and got my best grades that semester. It has expanded over the past 54 years and functions in three houses in Cambridge and Somerville today. During the years after medical school, I started three group homes for people who would become friends, the last on a 1600-acre estate outside Washington.

BS: How did this unusual work develop into creating innovative programs?

BW: The first was a couple and family therapy training program mainly run by a group of analysts at the Washington School of Psychiatry. Roger Shapiro was our mentor. I led this for more than 20 years, and it's now part of our center, run by Linda Grey, one of our graduates.

BS: Share some observations about your extensive work with couples and prognostic indicators?

BW: My goal in couple work is to try to help each person get a better sense of his or her partner's psychic reality. It's not about fashioning points of agreement, it's more about trying to help them understand what motivates the other. Becoming able to better mentalize the other's experience goes a long way in helping couples have a better life together.

In terms of prognosis, if a couple comes in a crisis, it's usually possible to restore the status quo before the crisis. To go beyond that is hard work and takes a lot of time. But the only situations that seem hopeless to me are those in which at least one member of the couple feels only contempt for the partner. I've never seen that change.

BS: Where did your organizing take you next?

BW: With the encouragement of a couple of senior colleagues, I started a four-year psychotherapy training program for clinicians, which I ran, primarily in a three-year format, for almost 30 years, abetted by a small loyal steering committee that stuck together all that time. There had initially been significant resistance to its creation, a fear that it would undermine the analytic enterprise, and it was allowed to open on a very close vote. Many of the students went into analysis and became analysts. A number of our current senior institute faculty began their psychoanalytic careers in this program.

BS: How did your involvement in the institute's management start?

BW: By now my colleagues had some serious respect for me, and the head of our Education Committee, Antoine Hani, made

me head of the Curriculum Committee, our first appointment of a non-TA to a major Institute post. During my 12-year tenure, we had a couple of important curriculum revisions, each of which took a few years to formulate, that moved the curriculum toward a pluralistic and integrative structure. We also added research study groups to the curriculum, and started a program of regular faculty/candidate dinners.

The rub was even with what I thought was a really solid education to offer, we weren't getting candidates. A senior colleague I really admired suggested that maybe we had become just a membership organization. I was upset to hear his willingness to surrender on training. I thought it was what gave form to the institute and without an educational function we'd be a hollow vessel. I met with the heads of the Education Committee and the society, and I pushed. I raised one option, which was to leave APsaA and just be part of the IPA, to allow us to get access to more potential candidates who didn't want to leave their current analyses. The society head suggested that instead we set a really low fee for candidates' analyses. When we brought both ideas back to the Education Committee, the vote was unanimous in favor of the low fee option because they didn't want to leave APsaA. And so, we got candidates, people who never would have been able to afford analyses now could manage to train with us.

But our faculty was drifting away. After leaving the Curriculum Committee, I started a Faculty Development Committee. Our first project was to conduct in-depth interviews with each of the 70 faculty members about their entire experience with the institute, from application, through candidacy, to the present. The ones I did lasted three to six hours. Half were happy with their training and teaching experiences, the other half had grievances. Surprisingly, many had had a key incident from which they had never really recovered in terms of their affiliation with the institute. Half the respondents expressed concern about morale: We don't connect with each other, I don't feel valued, it's unfriendly with an in-group and an out-group, I feel like an outsider, there's no engagement or excitement, members disappear and nobody reacts. And half the faculty complained about the supervisory and TA system: hierarchical, clubby, corrupt, arbitrary, destructive. The cultural devaluation of psychoanalysis added yet another layer.

BS: Did these people also have a particular vulnerability to narcissistic wounds and feeling excluded?

BW: I wouldn't try to guess their psychologies, but when half our analysts were feeling mistreated, it would have been a mistake for us to think this was their problem. To me, it seemed to be an issue of consistent institutional insensitivity. We accepted some people with reservations, we graduated some with qualifications, we tended to see their difficulties as their personal problems. I think your question captures the tendency toward arrogance that characterized some institutes' attitudes at that time. It's changed a lot, both locally and nationally.

We didn't honor our own. As an example, our continuing education had for years consisted of monthly dinner meetings at a hotel with an out-of-town guest speaker. We never presented our work to each other. Fifteen years ago, I initiated an annual colloquium, a daylong event at which faculty and candidates would present brief papers the group would then discuss. Tom Goldman has been overseeing the colloquium since its inception, and attendance has held up surprisingly well over the years.

BS: Tell us about New Directions, beyond what Billie Pivnick wrote for TAP last year [See “Writing Alone in the Presence of Others,” TAP 47/4, page 1].

BW: Sharon Alperovitz and I started the New Directions psychoanalytic writing program 18 years ago, with a student class from across the country. Three times a year about 50 students and 40 faculty meet to discuss psychoanalytic ideas on a given topic and to work on writing. We've worked with a few hundred students, who have generated substantial literature—papers, books, poetry—in a variety of genres.

BS: I know you've started some applied psychoanalytic programs.

BW: I worked with one of our research graduates, Marshall Alcorn, a professor in the English department at George Washington University, to create a psychoanalytic studies program for scholars.

I also created a psychoanalytic monthly film series, based on the one run for perhaps 30 years now by Julio Szmuilowicz at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society, with various film-buff colleagues chairing it each year.

BS: How did your interest in writing about film begin?

BW: Like many other analytic writers, I found it a way to explore ideas without being constrained by concerns about patient confidentiality. The Forum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film, which you and Gene Gordon founded, gave me lots of public settings for presentations. At the time, much of the psychoanalytic writing about film took the form of seeing what psychoanalysis could teach the film about what it was doing. This seemed reductive to me, operating from the position that we knew better what the film was really about than the director did. In my film writing, I've tried to see what the film could teach me about the human condition. Sometimes on the fifth or tenth viewing I get a whole new set of ideas.

BS: Do you find revisiting a film similar to finding more associations to the central idea of a dream?

BW: Either revisiting a dream, rethinking a story my patient has told me, or trying to sort out again what has been happening between us. In any of those contexts there's a continuing conversation that tries to expand the understanding.

BS: What operative methods did you develop for your programs?

BW: In forming all these activities, I had a few simple rules for myself. Be careful whom you recruit to administrate the program. The people have to be capable of taking initiative and following through, and congenial to work with. Having chosen them, trust them to do their jobs and don't get in their way. And never preempt them publicly, never feel you have to “introduce” them at a meeting, which

is a one-upping gesture regardless of how tactfully it's handled. Do this and you'll get the best they can give.

We shifted classes from the weekends to Wednesday afternoon, and set aside Wednesday evening for faculty study groups, thus offering a mid-week bloc of time that analysts could devote to the institute. Faculty groups met monthly throughout the year, and were open to everyone, with topics like art and creativity, group process, mentalization, panic disorder, neuropsychoanalysis, community process, Melanie Klein, Primo Levi, our organizational history, couple therapy, the seven deadly sins, and various clinical formats.

The Faculty Development Committee created a group to study the teaching of psychoanalysis. This group, which Richard Fritsch and I led, eventually formed a training model that would revamp psychoanalytic training for us. Some years earlier, David Joseph and I proposed combining the first year of teaching for psychotherapy students and psychoanalytic candidates, but at a poorly attended faculty meeting, with the opposition in high gear, this was shot down. I was challenged at a site visit for letting the idea fall away. With Dick Fritsch, we revisited it at this new study group and after a few years of organizational work and negotiation we created the Psychoanalytic Studies Program (PSP). In capsule, the PSP offers a two-year curriculum for candidates, potential candidates, psychotherapists, and scholars. For those interested in becoming analysts, it counts as the first two years of analytic training, even if the person doesn't apply for candidacy until after the program ends. We just finished our first year, working with 20 remarkable students. It's a way for clinicians curious about candidacy to engage with the field without the pressure of making a commitment. All the students are offered analysis on an appropriate fee basis. Dick and I will write this up for TAP or JAPA when we complete the work with our first cohort.

Meanwhile, I had grown dissatisfied with our teaching content in our psychotherapy training program (a program which in any event would be preempted now by the PSP). Specifically, I thought the clinical aspect of our psychotherapy training was weak, that we weren't effectively helping our students grasp their patients' psychic realities. I created a new program, Close Attention, as an educational experiment. What if we offered a program whose sole purpose was to help you get your mind around your patient's mind? Getting your mind around the patient's experience is hard, hard work. I designed a whole bunch of formats in which one could work at that, and that program is now entering its third year. It's been a hard sell to the clinician public, because it's rather stripped of formal theory teaching and on the surface looks too elementary, but it's actually making a mark on the participants.

BS: You seem to always be just a bit outside the system. You're not a TA. And you're not well known nationally despite all you've done educationally.

BW: I like being a bit of an eminence grise, outside the spotlight. I like creating programs and seeing them meet people's needs. I'm conflicted about public acknowledgment, easily self-conscious. You know I've put off your wanting to do this interview for a few years. I've also always felt best being a bit outside whatever I perceive to be the establishment. Upon entering medical school, I was one of two students out of 80 who knew we wanted to be psychiatrists, and that outsiderness felt comfortable to me. I was frightened by the prospect of submitting to analytic training, but after my analyst insisted that I was trying to practice analysis without a license, I relented and applied. Training was not the Procrustean bed I had anticipated. Nor were marriage and child-rearing the claustrophobic trap I feared. Quite the contrary.

On a few occasions I've been asked to apply to be a TA, and I haven't felt tempted. I think it means to me becoming part of a system that I'll find constricting, in terms of how I view the constraining forces in institutional psychoanalysis, where the terms have been, to such a wide extent, defined. I don't think I'm missing out. I really enjoy the work I do and feel I've gotten better at it over the years. Gotten better at creating functioning families.

BS: Your home in Bethesda has become the center of many functional families.

BW: We do hold a lot of activities there, and that's meaningful to me. You know, I respect the people I work with, but that's why I chose to work with them. Also, I'm pleased I could recognize when something I was doing for a long time wasn't working the way it needed to, and I could try to rethink it, like with the Close Attention program.

I think our institute and center needed someone with an educational-organizational vision to create programs. That person doesn't need to run them, but primarily needs to find the right people in the organization to do that. Our New Directions program, as an example, has held 51 weekend conferences, each organized by a faculty member or graduate. My skill has been in finding the right people to do that, then providing only the help that person needs. Friends ask me how I manage to do so much organizationally, and my answer is always the same: delegate.

BS: How do you envision spending your seventies and eighties?

BW: Trying to stay in shape and spending time with my family, especially my amazing new grandchildren. Continuing working to find the best ways to educate clinicians. And writing.

BS: Your article on time that begins with “Time's arrow peers out at me from behind my awareness,” deserves reading by a wide audience. It was published in Anne Adelman and Kerry Malawista's book, The Therapist in Mourning.

BW: Thanks. I did write a book that got a good reception, and I'm working on two other books now. The one really underway is based on a set of extensive interviews Kerry and I are doing with psychoanalysts from around the world, using 30 questions about their work experience. We're collecting some very interesting accounts. The other book is a project Marshall Alcorn and I are developing with the scholars in our new program. So I always have much too much to do. Which, of course, is also about something.