On December 7, 2020, the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research took a step toward mitigating structural racism in psychoanalysis by announcing the establishment of the endowed Margaret Morgan Lawrence, MD Psychoanalytic Training Scholarship at Columbia University with a founding gift of $75,000 over three years. Columbia's society, the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine, also announced the establishment of a triennial lecture, the Margaret Morgan Lawrence MD Lecture on Psychoanalysis and Social Justice. At the announcement event over Zoom, Dionne Powell and Brenda Berger spoke, as well as Margaret Morgan Lawrence's three highly accomplished children, and our institute and society were able to recognize and acknowledge our important but regrettable history in training the first Black psychoanalyst in America.
Margaret Cornelia Morgan Lawrence's story is beautifully captured in Balm In Gilead: Journey of a Healer (Addison Wesley, 1988), which her daughter the Harvard sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot wrote after a series of many interviews with her mother. Lawrence, who died in December 2019 at the age of 105, was born into a family then living in rural Mississippi, with a father who was an Episcopal priest. But in some ways her life story really started before she was born with the death of her beloved older brother Sandy Alonzo Morgan, nicknamed Candy Man for his white skin and golden ringlets. Though he died at age 17 months, his portrait dominated the living room of each home in which the family lived. Lawrence later realized, “I want to be a doctor in order to save a child like my brother from death.” Her mother was a passionate teacher but one who deeply missed her family in Harlem when she followed her husband to the deep South. She would take to bed for months at a time as the family moved, following Reverend Morgan
Susan C. Vaughan, MD, is director of Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, associate professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Columbia University, Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.
to various parishes before settling in Vicksburg, Mississippi, when Margaret was 7.
An only child, Margaret spent much of her time alone, in reverie and fantasy. Her intelligence and drive were soon recognized as she was quickly promoted, beginning Magnolia High school in Vicksburg at age 12. Summers in New York City were both a chance to see how her mother brightened when back with her family as well as to get to know Harlem where Lawrence would later work. For the end of high school, she transferred to the prestigious Wadleigh School for Girls in New York City where she won top prizes and was mentored by some of Harlem's most successful career women.
She went to Cornell University, which was a lonely place for her, as she was often the only Black student on campus. She took a job as a live-in maid (while a full-time pre-medical student) because she was not allowed to live in the all-white dorms. Upon graduation, she was stunned and saddened not to be admitted to Cornell Medical School (whose dean finally apologized to her in 2008). With the help of her Harlem mentors, she applied and was admitted to the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons.
While home in Vicksburg during college, she met and fell in love with a handsome, well-spoken and talkative young Morehouse man, Charles R. Lawrence II who was full of ideas about racism and pacifism. The two dreamed of creating an institution where he would work on race relations and she would care for the physical and mental wellbeing of the children. They married in her father's Vicksburg church then lived apart for two years while she finished medical school at Columbia.
When Lawrence completed medical school, she was once again disappointed by discrimination when Babies Hospital at Columbia refused to take her as an intern because she would have to live in the nurses' dorm, which did not allow Black residents. She trained instead at Harlem Hospital and did a year of public health training during which she encountered Benjamin Spock, who became an influential mentor.
The Lawrences then moved to Nashville, where Lawrence worked at Meharry Hospital while her husband worked for the Institute on Race Relations at Fisk University. Three children followed in rapid succession before the family returned to New York, where Lawrence accepted a position at Harlem Hospital and undertook training at Columbia Psychoanalytic at the urging of Viola Bernard, an important mentor. Her analyst was Eugene Milch and her supervisor David Levy.
Once again at Columbia, Lawrence's graduation would be a time of uncertainty and disappointment. As Dionne Powell writes in “Race, African Americans, and Psychoanalysis: Collective Silence in the Therapeutic Conversation,” “Lawrence faced tremendous obstacles, including being a child of the deep South raised under the strictures of Jim Crow, encountering resistance toward her analytic training due to her race, and being treated as a foreigner in her own country.”
The opposition she faced at Columbia included Sándor Radó's questioning Lawrence's preparedness for graduation. Despite the candidate's meeting all requirements and having the support of Bernard and Spock, Radó informed Lawrence that an additional consultation with Abram Kardiner, a member of the graduation committee, was required. Ultimately, “Lawrence refused to meet with Kardiner and the request was withdrawn.” Lawrence told Powell many years later, the impact of the additional requirement remained with her “as a humiliating assault on (my) self.”
Powell explained in her paper and at the December 7th announcement:, “Kardiner, with Lionel Ovesey…had recently finished The Mark of Oppression, a controversial psychoanalytically based exploration of Negro oppression and the resulting psychological damage from generations of enslavement, the development of within-race caste systems, and the ongoing necessity by whites to degrade the status of Blacks (Kardiner and Ovesey 1951). Lawrence had refused to assist in the book's creation, having suspected the racist ideological overtones in the book that her presence at Columbia directly challenged. Ultimately the book was a mix of ‘two-dimensional minimization of multi-determined factors of development’ that characterized a degraded ‘Negro personality,’ of low self-esteem, a sense of inferiority and a ‘wretched internal life.’” As Powell movingly said at the
event, “Dr. Lawrence's life proves that to be a lie.”
Powell went on to speak of “the racial micro-aggressions and pejorative racial bias that continue to plague the candidate experience,” but noted, “Candidates today are more sensitively attuned to and accepting of the multiply determined self as a gendered, racial and cultural subject” and most importantly they are “ready to challenge these biases and prejudices actively in their training.”
Powell noted Lawrence's spiritual life was always her north star and pointed out that the “lack of diversity in those we treat, train and teach fosters a continuing collective silence around racial trauma within ourselves, our society and our profession.” What psychoanalysis needs, she asserted, is a serious call to action, a move begun at Columbia with the establishment of Lawrence's scholarship fund.
Brenda Berger, a white South African analyst at Columbia who lived in the treacherous apartheid system for the first 20 years of her life, spoke next about the importance of bringing “deeply held trauma to the experiential level so that mourning and healing can occur.” She recounted moments when she was struck silent— imploding, overwhelmed, sickened, afraid, ashamed. “I remember the degrading yelling by the white policemen, the horrible sight of them lifting up grown men by the scruffs of their necks and throwing them into police vans, heads first. The cracking of those heads against iron was a heartbreaking sound, indelibly carved into my senses at a young age.”
She said, “My many silences still haunt me. They happened because the violence of a history of slavery, brutality and oppression shocked, scared and hurt too badly. The multiple repetitions taught me to split and disavow.” While acknowledging bystander trauma in no way compares to the trauma of the victims, she was heartened that the “unbearable boot on George Floyd's neck, was NOT followed by silence. People of all colors, from all sectors of American society, rose up, a powerful Black Lives Matter movement is demanding and getting attention, admission, atonement. Some reversal seems to be happening.”
“When therapy is successful there will be social and cultural ripples, if not waves… There is a strong, if complicated relationship between psychotherapy and social change.”
Lawrence's older daughter, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Emily Hargroves Fisher Research Professor of Education at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, read next from her 1988 book about her mother, Balm in Gilead.
Dr. Margaret Cornelia Morgan Lawrence stands on a podium, ready to address her fellow psychoanalysts. Her long black hair, laced with silver, is braided into a soft crown around her head. Her brown skin is serene and unlined. She looks silently at her audience before she speaks. Her loose, rust-colored dress hangs in graceful curves and amber earrings dangle halfway to her shoulders, casting light patterns, the only sign of motion in her calm presence…. [S]he inherited eloquence and authority from her father, an Episcopal priest from Mississippi. But she would rather be doing psychotherapy with children—making up puppet shows and plays, finger painting, throwing water balloons than talking about the theories behind her work.
Not the silent, distant analyst, Lawrence invoked her family history, her culture, her experiences, as dimensions of her craft. She urged the audience “to know the values embedded in your cultural perspective; know the inner workings of your own psyche … before you dare to ask others for stories.” The poor, she said “do not necessarily have ‘impoverished’ emotional lives, although such is often the assumption.” Referring to the social justice dimension of her work, she pointed out therapy is not designed simply to maintain the status quo, to make impoverished people feel comfortable with their deprived state. “When therapy is successful there will be social and cultural ripples, if not waves. Individual health inspires a changed view of old, unproductive conditions. There is a strong, if complicated, relationship between psychotherapy and social change.”
Lawrence-Lightfoot also described the process of work on the book with her mother:
Her mind is poetic and playful, not literal or analytic; she rarely follows strict chronology, rarely remembers dates but never forgets history. She speaks directly from feelings, from emotional content. Her mind puts things together that others see as disparate or unconnected. She can make patterns from stray remnants of all shapes and colors. Hers is an intelligence exquisitely suited to a psychoanalyst who must help the patient integrate fragments of history, gathering loose threads from the distant past.
Her mother said working on the book together “feels like a second analysis.” Later, “exhausted, sometimes exhilarated by discovery and memories of victory, sometimes saddened by images of defeat and humiliation,” mother and daughter sang grace together over veal stew and shrimp stir-fry, the table set with a golden tablecloth and burnt-orange napkins.
“Poverty, in this the richest of world powers, is still our heritage. Racism, in a country dedicated to its people's inalienable rights, speaks as clearly of man's inhumanity to man as did slavery.”
Lawrence's son, Charles R. Lawrence, III, a constitutional law scholar whose expertise includes anti-discrimination law, equal protection and critical race theory, described his mother as, “first and foremost a freedom fighter. She was a healer, a teacher and an activist for peace and justice, and she did not see these as separate or even complementary vocations. All of her work was the work of making Black Lives Matter, which indeed, in a racist world, is inseparable from the struggle to make all lives matter.” He recounted how his mother's book, Young Inner-City Families: Development of Ego Strength Under Stress, begins with a poem by the lawyer, priest and poet Pauli Murray entitled, To the Oppressor.
But ours is a subtle strengthPotent with centuries of yearningOf being kegged and shut awayIn dark forbidden places
“My mother's life, teaching and medical practice,” he said, “were built upon and governed by three deeply held beliefs and principles. The first was her belief in the inherent humanity and wholeness of every person she encountered. She believed that the injuries of mental illness are caused by, and are endemic to the ideology, institutions and conditions of white supremacy and racism. The underlying pathology is not found in the individual but in the legacy of slavery in a nation that continues to be ravaged by the scourge of racism, segregation, and poverty.” His mother wrote, in a 1970 report of the Joint Commission on Mental Health of Children: “Poverty, in this the richest of world powers, is still our heritage. Racism, in a country dedicated to its people's inalienable rights, speaks as clearly of man's inhumanity to man as did slavery.”
A second principle of his mother's work was her belief in the strength and wisdom of the people, families, and communities with whom she worked. “Like every good freedom-fighter, she knew that the battle against the pathology of human oppression can only be won in collaborative struggle with those who are most oppressed.”
She wrote: “Whether in the bottoms or on the hill, the legacy of poverty, racism and dehumanization still plagues us. We are still, Black and white, too little aware of the inherent and historical strengths of those with whom we labor. And the tools of our various disciplines are made dull in our own despair… We defend ourselves for our lack of success with the belief that our precious tools, such as psychiatry and psychoanalysis do not apply for the poor and minorities in our population. I call upon those engaged in work on the hills and in the bottoms of our land to join in using their disciplines and themselves as tools to bring into relief our own resources… and the strengths and resources of the people with whom we work.”
Urging a focus on ego strengths rather than pathology in Black, brown and poor communities, his mother asserted, “In their training, students and residents should be taught to utilize not only the biological and psychodynamic principles traditional to psychiatry…Our patients should not be seen as targets at which we aim our expertise, but as collaborators in the maintenance or restoration of health.” Echoing the “subtle strength” spoken of in Pauli Murray's poem, she writes that psychoanalysts who expose themselves to a shared humanity in people less fortunate than themselves, “will discover ego strengths that have survived terrible odds…”
Charles Lawrence noted that centering on ego strength, rather than pathology, is more than an efficacious tool of medical practice. It also does the anti-racist work of challenging white supremacy's narrative of Black pathology. It identifies the injuries of mental illness as the product of the pathological social disease of racism. It teaches Black and Brown communities that they are the chief agents of understanding and strength in the struggle for liberty against that societal sickness.
He affirmed his mother's belief that this societal pathology of racism and caste injures all of us; in it we are prevented from recognizing the full humanity of others, from knowing that when any of us is vulnerable to sickness and deprivation all of us are made vulnerable.
“To truly honor Dr. Lawrence, you must train all your students in the art, science, and vocation of liberation healing. Young Inner-City Families should be required reading for all students, and every resident should do clinical training in a therapeutic setting modeled on those described in that book.”
The final speaker, Margaret Morgan Lawrence's younger daughter, the Reverend Paula Lawrence-Wehmiller, a prominent and prolific educator and Episcopal priest, told two stories about her mother. First, she recounted a time “when our mother, Margaret, was a little girl, tough and adventurous, and the story goes, went with her Episcopal priest father, Rev. Morgan to visit the sick and lay his healing hands on them. He is tall and handsome in his clerical clothes, striding down the Mississippi road with his brown-skin daughter, her plaits bouncing down beyond her shoulders on her back as she moves her strong, young legs to keep up with him. She is carrying in her hands a little basket with a set of miniature communion vessels. If Margaret had been born a boy, she might well have become a priest like her father. But these healing journeys with her father to offer the outward signs of God's inward and invisible grace to a world in need nourished her dream of becoming another kind of healer – a physician.”
She showed a sepia-toned photograph of her mother at age 28 in her Harlem Hospital physician's coat, leaning over a little girl in a hospital bed. “Mom's healing hands are barely touching the little girl's toes. In the midst of the uproar of life outside, there is a sanctuary for this little girl in the doctor's healing touch. As an adult, I have carried this healing image in my heart and in my mind's eye and have had the sepia-toned photograph on the walls of wherever my work as teacher, as principal, as counselor, as child advocate, and, for the last 22 years as an Episcopal priest.”
It was a healing touch the daughter knew intimately, when at her ordination to the priesthood, 56 years after that sepia-toned photo was taken, “Mom leaned over me to vest me in my priest's stole. I felt in her healing touch that moment of sanctuary from long ago at Harlem Hospital. And with it, a blessing passed down from our priest grandfather to his physician daughter and now to his granddaughter, the priest. I hear the blessing in the words Mom wrote to me in a letter a few days later: ‘You were brought by God's grace into this needy world. Keep giving to it and to those who love you, and to those who have not yet learned how.’
With this benediction, Reverend Lawrence-Wehmiller closed the evening, which served to educate and recapture for those of us at Columbia a little recognized and highly significant woman from our past who had the passion, drive, endurance, and grace to do what it took to learn psychoanalysis in an unwelcoming era and whose life and career remind us of all the work we still have to do as a center and as a profession.