Theory as Trauma
A foray into applied psychoanalysis
Emily Kuriloff, Psy.D.
… We forget that all of us are in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by a train is waiting. (Levi, 1986, pp.50-51)
…The greatest enemy of Fascism is man. (Grossman, 1980, pp.195)
It was Tuesday, September 11, 2001, and the radio in the taxi had just reported that the second tower had fallen. I paid my fare and proceeded to the third floor of the William Alanson White Institute. The weekly clinical services meeting would welcome Gail Hornstein, author of a new biography (2000) of Frieda Fromm Reichmann, a founder of an American psychoanalytic tradition upon which the White Institute was built, and a refugee from Nazi Germany.
The conference room on the Upper West Side of New York was far from empty that morning as the minutes passed, and while a small number of participants chose not to stay, it was decided fairly quickly that the program would proceed. Hornstein broke the tension by noting that Fromm Reichmann herself had not cancelled a similar weekly meeting on the Monday night of December 8th, 1941, despite the fact that Roosevelt had just declared World War II. When she was asked at that gathering what she would do for the war effort, Fromm-Reichmann reportedly stated, "I know what I'm going to do. I'll do what I know best. I'll do psychotherapy" (p. 117)
On September 11, 2001, and earlier, on December 8th, 1941, those of us who went on with our meetings and our lives "as usual" temporarily jettisoned a threatening, destabilizing reality. Such is one typical response to calamity. Yet there have been other moments in the history of psychoanalysis when such use of compartmentalization is neither temporary nor partial. Martin Bergmann (1984), for example, replies to a question regarding the effect of the Holocaust upon clinical psychoanalysis by stating, "The Hitler experience was the central one of our adulthood, and the significance is undoubtedly very great, but I would not see it as particularly in terms of psychoanalytic technique…It does not seem, to my knowledge anyway, that it affected the technique per se, apart from the general development which psychoanalytic technique has undergone…" (pp.209-210)
This essay challenges Bergmann's notion that theoretical and clinical psychoanalysis can so readily be isolated from cultural context, particularly the context of Nazi Europe. I am not suggesting that this or any one upheaval represents the singular influence around which all subsequent psychoanalytic theory and praxis springs. And because the mysterious unconscious, and dissociated or repressed experience lie at the center of my musings, a measure of inference is required. Furthermore, even the most obvious or substantial connections between a theorist's ideas and nascent Holocaust themes cannot fully encompass the trajectory of a unique mind in action.
Nonetheless I invite the reader to focus upon the usefulness, and not merely the correctness of the hypotheses in the service of greater and broader understanding. Approach the argument, if you will, in the less linear spirit of curiosity, even wonder, sparked by the realization that the disruptions of fascism were universally, if not uniformly in play during a critical and defining period in the development of Psychoanalysis. The goal, finally, is to begin a fruitful dialogue regarding this fateful relationship after long silence.
That prominent psychoanalysts rarely publicly acknowledged the Holocaust's influence on their professional lives is the greatest obstacle to understanding its impact. For most of the twentieth century, but particularly during the immediate post war era, analysts valorized a notion of neutrality, while subjective experience was relegated to the heap of irrelevant or, worse, neurotic interference. As but one example, when the Columbia Psychoanalytic Society's Bluma Swerdloff (1963) interviewed Heinz Hartmann, she asked about the relationship of his personal experience to his ideas. His responses are rather general and reflect his satisfaction with his career in America. Asked if he "personally" suffered from Hitler's Anschluss he answers, "No, not at all." (74). Editing his recorded remarks at a later date, Hartmann omits a revealing comment in the transcript, regarding his wife's status as a Jew in Nazi Europe. "That was always very difficult", (75) he had originally said, but later deleted. During a separate interview, (1973) his wife, Dora, a Viennese pediatrician retrained in the US as an analyst, was somewhat more revealing of the family's plight. She likewise highlighted their good fortune, notably their Swiss citizenship as a result of her husband's family legacy. Clearly the Hartmanns were not subjected to the same degree of uncertainty or victimization as were others with less status, money, or international connections. Yet Dora Hartmann also comments upon her long wait for a second round of US Visas for the family, after the time sensitive documents expired because of an initial decision to relocate in Paris. Later, when the Nazis encircled Europe and the Hartmann's fled France to a surrounded, albeit neutral Switzerland, Dora describes feeling "like a mouse in a trap." (19) Ultimately she, too, trivializes this chapter. "But, I mean, there are a lot of things that happened", she concludes, "I don't think its really of professional interest…"(17) How similar this sounds to her husband's earlier (1963) comment that his transition to the United States was "comparatively easy, not in every respect, but professionally it was easy." (Italics added, p. 74) Nowhere in either conversation lies the hint of a challenge to the compartmentalization of the personal and the professional, while this writer, a product of my time, constructs a thesis defined by a now dominant historicism. For both better and worse, what is public is understood in dialectical relation to the private, and vice versa.
What, then, can be said about the impact of the Holocaust on psychoanalysis? Do Bergmann's and D. Hartmann's disclaimers merely suggest the systematic, positivist thrust of mid century psychoanalysis, while my hypotheses reflect a deconstructive relativism? Perhaps, but Bergmann's and the Hartmann's responses may also reveal some degree of trauma, of experience so overwhelming as to be only partially appreciated, even adaptively dissociated. After all, as Russell (1996) notes, trauma by definition, inspires some "failure of recognition." (602) Hartmann and his contemporaries were in fact more than civilians in physical proximity to terror or war. He and his fellow psychoanalysts were specifically targeted as Jews, as members of a so-called "liberal" profession, and/or as political activists who were among the opposition to National Socialism. Western and Middle Europeans who had achieved great professional and social stature over a lifetime were suddenly disenfranchised and separated from their bourgeois comfort and beloved culture. They lost close family and friends forever. As Steiner describes, "All were suddenly to find themselves propelled into a colossal institutional, personal, psychic, and emotional maelstrom. "(p.5) Freud's own narrow escape did not benefit his closest biological relatives-his four Viennese sisters- all of whom were killed at Auschwitz. The second generation of European analysts-those born around 1900- were similarly affected, A. Freud, Fenichel, Hartmann, Kris, and Kohut being among the best known.
Heinz Hartmann
Freud's 1923 work on the tripartite model and the organizing functions of the ego clearly lay the groundwork for much of the scholarly and creative contributions of Heinz Hartmann, long considered the founder of Ego Psychology. Hartmann's focus on the Ego's adaptation as a means to reference psychic life and health thus preceded the advent of National Socialism and the Anschluss in Austria, and emerges instead from a larger philosophical and scientific tradition upon which Freud first drew. Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) claim that Hartmann's proceeding from the premise of Freudian theory- as -bedrock reflects his exposure, via his father and grandfather, to constitutional law, wherein the "constitution is a given" or, in this case, "the essence" of Freud is diktat. (p. 238) Shafer,(1970), on the other hand, appreciates Hartmann as an innovator. Put differently, Shafer refuses to accept Hartmann as the self appointed representative of a tradition, a thinker who criticizes "Neo-Freudians", for instance, for undoing what he terms an "at least semi-systematic" psychoanalysis. "The part is based on the whole" of a unified theory, Hartmann typically explains, so that changing one aspect may corrupt the whole of metapsychology.
(1964, p.132) Shafer instead notes Hartmann's willingness to expand upon, or alter aspects of Freudian principles. Praising Hartmann's rejection of Freud's "dualistic framework", or his questioning of such absolutes as "pleasure principle-reality principle, sublimated-unsublimated, id impulse-ego defense" (60), Shafer explains that Hartmann introduced "notions of degree" and "flexibly managed reference points" that also served many "conceptually distinct functions"(61) Hartmann's son Ernst, himself a psychoanalyst who has contributed to the literature on Dreams, recalls that his father privately spoke of Freud's limitations as a thinker, viewing him instead as the consummate messenger of a new sensibility. (personal communication) Shafer does acknowledges that Hartmann "rather consistently underestimated (or underemphasized?) the extent to which he disagreed with Freud, correcting him, altering some of the foundations of his theory, and perhaps above all establishing a basis for a continuing challenge of psychoanalytic theory." (59) What might account for this "underemphasis"?
Challenging accepted belief invariably places a group member in danger of disapprobation or even rejection, and is rarely done with alacrity, regardless of the particular circumstance. But in Hartmann's case also consider the ambiance surrounding metapsychology at the time, captured in a conversation recounted by an emotionally moved Sterba (Steiner, 1983, p.147) that occurred just before he fled Vienna. Freud compared the expulsion of psychoanalysis from Europe to the fall of Jerusalem's second temple in 70 A.D. He then added, Sterba reports, that he hoped his followers--not unlike the 'high Priests' in ancient Yavneh-- would safeguard and spread his ideas in exile. Sanctifying metapsychology in this way may have been fueled by its public depreciation and brutal eviction from its all too recent birthplace. Healthy dissent in this context would be mistaken for a form of irreverence, or continued destructiveness towards an already devastated community with little opportunity to sufficiently mourn.
A consummate scientist in part fulfilling Freud's dream of a general psychoanalytic theory of mind, Hartmann developed the notion of an autonomous ego as a part of an individual's normal adaptation—more precisely a "conflict free sphere" of the ego, fueled neither by libido nor aggression. (1939,1964) Makari , (2008) a psychoanalytic historian who also notes Hartmann's less dualistic vision in favor of "a dialectic between inner and outer", suggests that such a conception represents " an adaptation to the problems created by the collapse of liberalism in Europe." (454) That Hartmann imagined psychic function unbridled by onerous conflict or instinctual pressure, was, according to Makari, his dedication to "the potentials of human liberty while islands of freedom in Europe were being devoured." (455)
Makari tells us that it was only after finding refuge in America, however, that "ego psychologists wrapped themselves in Freud's coat and attempted to collapse differences…" (484) Their vibrant homelands soon to become graveyards, Makari concludes that the "exiled survivors and followers fell into the vastness of their future accompanied by a word, a name, a talisman: Freud." (485)
Ironically Hartmann's "conflict free sphere" may best represent his own conflict regarding his status as loyal Freudian vs. innovator. On the one hand, the sphere's distinct or exceptional status is an attempt to expand while preserving Freud's dynamic, energic model, but on the other hand it suggests human motives independent of the drives. We are left with the provocative question, "From what source does this sphere derive its energy?" Hartmann remains vague on this point. In an "unelaborated footnote" (Greenberg, 1991, p.49) to a late paper on sublimation, Hartmann finally uses the term "noninstinctual" or "primary ego energy" to refer to that which comprises the "conflict free" sphere. Greenberg spells out that such language betrays an heretical notion that there are, in fact, aims "not organized around libidinal or destructive needs", so that Hartmann "is whistling past a theoretical graveyard when he dismisses this new idea as a 'terminological note."(49)
Indeed, Ego psychology's contributions regarding the various ways and means of adaptation prompted meaningful changes beyond theory, altering clinical psychoanalysis. Relying less upon the Analyst's "genetic" or 'id' interpretations that leap over the analysand's defensive/adaptive strategies, the analyst's inquiry instead begins "at the surface" so that the patient herself becomes the owner and agent of her actions and reactions, and finally of insight and change. (Kris, 1951)
If Hartmann or Kris acknowledged in writing that their concepts propelled new analytic rules of engagement, they repeatedly assured the reader that Freud himself was working towards such developments, implying the professor's all important, if tacit approval. Whether or not they were willing or able to say as much, however, defense analysis is also an idea of its time. That is, clinicians manipulated by the "Hitlerai", perhaps felt their will and agency in sharp relief, and as pivotal in mental functioning. (One refugee analyst writes to Jones upon her escape: "You cannot imagine what it means for us the feeling of having won back human freedom." [Steiner, 120.]) To particularly highlight and foster the patient's activity and will was thus a corrective, and perhaps more keenly valued as central to mental health and happiness. Many of us who have lived and worked during more than fifty years of relative peace and safety, (before September 11th, that is), in a society that encourages freedom of expression and individual differences, have felt less covetous of our "human freedom", and lingered longer in the tension between self and other, attachment and separateness, assertiveness and surrender.
The earlier generation instead suffered the narcissistic crisis of the victim, forced to flee degradation and disenfranchisement without the option to stand and fight for oneself and one's people. Ego psychology's focus on personal agency and responsibility, vs. its relative disinterest in the Other may thus be the refugee analyst's renunciation of this passive, ignominious identification with victim hood
Despite such over determined motives, the Ego Psychologist's appreciation for self determination can be particularly useful to patients when the roar of acute trauma or the hum of the cumulative sort becomes imprisoning. Identification with this analytic attitude introduces the possibility of movement from a conviction of embeddedness to the possibility of experimenting with new ways of being .
Erich Fromm and Melanie Klein
The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, a refugee from Nazi Germany who had studied at the prominent Berlin Institute, shares Hartmann's respect for individual agency. Unlike Hartmann, Fromm acknowledges the impact of German Fascism upon the individual psyche and society in general. In his book "Escape from Freedom", for example, Fromm accounts for Nazism's success in the human tendency to succumb en masse for fear of loss of love or disapprobation. For him conflict is not the chafing of forbidden wishes (drive derivatives) against guilt and fear of punishment, but instead the pain of loneliness, and the anxiety of the unknown vs. the triumph of personal subjectivity and agency as it differs from the mob or the status quo.
That this quintessentially interpersonal view of conflict is cast in terms of world politics confirms that the civic unrest and danger of the age was all consuming, particularly to an analyst less averse to the impact of culture and society upon the private psyche. That he makes use of a situation in which the survival of civilization lies in the balance also reflects the manner in which the crisis influences the quality of Fromm's thinking for the rest of his days. Even as he introduces a useful revision to Freud's quantitative conflict theory, he ironically leaves the reader and the patient little room for conflict. In short, there is the more 'exalted' direction of humanism, which he translates as an appreciation for, and loyalty to the individual, vs. the 'wrong' or lowly choice of surrender to a authority or to mere familiarity. Where is Fromm's tolerance for the gray area that is so characteristic of a psychoanalytic awareness, the struggle back and forth that is itself transformative, and moreover the mourning for what is always lost by virtue of having chosen?
Fromm may be speaking from his interest and study of Rabbinic Judaism, in which clear ethical choices become imperative acts. (Bellamy, 1998, p.110) Yet Fromm's views might also be construed as characteristic of a trauma response. A splitting off of psychic awareness or consciousness causes a split between idealization and devaluation of the other, or of a particular position vs. another. Klein might understand Fromm's style as a "paranoid-schizoid", as opposed to a "depressive" stance, the latter a more fulsome and nuanced readiness for ambivalence and conflict. She conceives of these two modes as fluctuant, as opposed to points upon a linear progression or regression. Because Klein recognizes how difficult it can be for the individual to sustain a depressive anxiety, the paranoid schizoid alternative offers protection, particularly when an opportunity to repair conflict feels untenable. Among the immeasurable factors that must have influenced Klein's thinking, it bears noting that this more supple theory was conceived by a Jewish analyst who left Germany in 1926, before Hitler's ascent to power, certainly with no hint of the peril Nazi Germany would bring to those outside its kith and kin. While her reasons for quitting Berlin were undoubtedly due to personal and professional conflicts, she was nonetheless "invited" by a then eager British psychoanalytic society who, as she put it, afforded her "lots of work with favourable material, scientific and personal prospects." (Likierman, 2001, p.11) She was thus in Britain by choice. Fromm was invited to Chicago in 1934 by Horney, but by then he was among an ever growing flock of Jewish analysts in flight from the Nazi regime. (Ortmeyer, 1995, p.23) With little opportunity to repair or resolve the public and private anxiety into which Fromm was propelled, a paranoid schizoid response may have been all that was bearable.
Still, in her intellectual biography of Klein, Liekerman (2001) notes that as the London Blitz raged a child patient of Klein's had obsessive, "yet realistic" fears of Hitler. (p.72) The boy's preoccupation with the Nazi's war, according to Liekerman, "only served to intensify Klein's quest to discover more about internal wars and their outcomes". As Makari(2008) points out, the "Kleinian model had no place for historical specificity." With its focus on the intrapsychic and more pointedly sadistic impulses, Makari imagines how "hollow" such clinical explanations of war anxiety must have sounded to "those in Europe who looked at Nazi Germany and wondered what happened to the land of Geothe and Schiller." (448)
Klein's inward focus after an interwar period characterized by a greater psychoanalytic integration of culture and psyche begs the question: Was her conclusion that "Hitler was the convenient temporary receptacle for [the child's] early anxiety situation, itself Oedipal", (p.72-3) a brilliant clinical formulation, or, (we must ask the obvious), was Klein's conception a 'convenient temporary receptacle' for the overwhelming trauma of bombardment, and the anxiety-the near panic, I would imagine- she herself experienced, not knowing where Hitler might go next? Kleinian tradition remains dedicated to the study of unconscious processes within the psychoanalytic situation, with less focus not only on the environment, but also the so called "two person" back and forth in the dyad. This, despite the quintessentially relational nature of Klein's ideas, focused as they are upon self and other. That Ogden (1989) and Mitchell (1988) have appropriated her formulations to better suit the current relational turn may to some degree be a corrective to Klein's avoidance of actual events so intolerable as to be avoided or trivialized.
What then of Fromm through the Kleinian eyes of Ogden and Mitchell? Fromm's mien may have at times alienated patients, (perhaps those from a later generation more so than his own) making them feel, as Maccoby writes, as though they were "being hit over the head with a stick" .( p.74 ) Yet this paranoid-schizoid approach was an appropriate, or well related response to Fascism. Imagine if Fromm were able to extend his rallying cry to the whole of German citizenry at the time, or even to those German Jews who refused to take seriously (until the gates to immigration were finally sealed off) that the lines of right and wrong, and moreover of life and death were being starkly drawn, and picking sides was all? Would the plight of even a few Holocaust victims have been altered?
The nature and content of Fromm's comments regarding Adenauer's postwar Germany (1968, unpublished manuscript), reflect a rigidity of characteter, a persistence of a more or less paranoid schizoid stance, long after its usefulness in time. In 1968 Fromm insists that for Germany, "The forces which were underlying the expansionism of the monarchy and of Hitler are still the same, and they are rallying.." He warns the casual citizen not to be lulled by the break up of Germany's military or of the nation itself, lest the world be ignorant to a repetition "of the years 1933 to 1937". Undoubtedly post war Germany felt uneasy with its Nazi past, sometimes downright revisionist when asked to claim responsibility, and yet the nation was in no way spoiling for another world war.
Perhaps, then, Fromm is suffering from what the historian and German Jewish refugee Fritz Stern (2007) describes regarding his response to the American student movement in 1968. He notes,"…with the European past in mind, I saw things too starkly. When colleagues heard the murmur of dissent, I may have heard the distant sound of marching thugs." (260). The beneficiary of a contemporary deconstructive historicism, Stern acknowledges the "keenness of insight" that his personal involvement in his work awakens. ( ) As a result he counsels caution for historians, and for us all. He quotes Faulkner, who warns: "The past isn't dead. It's not even past."(401)
Otto Fenichel
Otto Fenichel, once an outspoken activist, became seemingly reluctant to speak out against the status quo. He left a burgeoning career as a psychoanalyst when he fled Austria as much because of his leftist, subversive politics as his Jewishness, and tried in earnest to re-establish himself in the United States. In his book The Repression of Psychoanalysis,( 1983) the author Jacoby mourns the loss of Fenichel's bold appraisal of the individual embedded in a repressed and oppressive society. According to Jacoby emigration to moderate capitalist democracies less than sympathetic to a particularly Marxist critique further inhibited the so called "political Freudians" . We are told that while Fenichel continued to send a secret letter (a 'rundbriefe") to his circle of like minded refugees, his professional future in America took precedence, part of which involved a rigorous, time consuming residency program that would re-train him in medicine, and this during his late 4o's. It is meaningful that this training was not a requirement, per se, for him to practice psychoanalysis, but rather a means towards acceptance into the most established institutes. During this period his classic tome, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, was also completed and published. Jacoby groups this effort together with all of Fenichel's attempt to capitulate to the American medical establishment, and critiques the work as mechanical, even perfunctory. As Fenichel completes his book and begins to surrender himself to a grueling hospital regimen, Jacoby evokes a portrait of an overweight middle aged man in an ill fitting white suit typically worn by house officers half his age. Only months later he was to die suddenly of a cerebral aneurysm, a demise hastened, we may assume, at least in part by the trauma of expulsion, resettlement, but moreover the struggle to integrate who he was with what was lost along the way.
Does Fenichel's fate foreshadow a mainstreaming "death" of European psychoanalysis, a profession that became distinguishable only by specific content from any American medical subspecialty, complete with its scientific facts and technique?
Decades before the Holocaust, Freud, pictured in Gay's(1985) biography as the epitome of a bourgeois gentleman rather than a renegade, yearned for the sort of wider acceptance and recognition psychoanalysis received in post war America. He had wished to be the creator of a general scientific theory, not unlike his hero Darwin. Mindful of the high representation of the Jewish minority in the movement, and in response to a mounting anti Semitism in the culture at large, he chose the non Jewish Jung, and later Hartmann, (who was only 1/4 Jewish) to appeal to the majority, the mainstream. (Roazen,1992) Whether psychoanalysis was, or would have ever been amenable to the sort of challenge to culture and tradition Jacoby celebrates in the early efforts of Fenichel and his peers thus remains questionable.
Nonetheless Freud had in fact condemned American society as a superficial, "anti- paradise," where quantity, or material consumption of goods, superceded quality. He once told Jones that America was "useful for nothing else but to supply money." (Gay, p. 565) He resented its opposition to lay psychoanalysis in favor of the supply and demand of trained analysts controlled by affluent physicians, proof to him of America's preoccupation with the dollar rather than a depth psychology. Although Freud the moderate social democrat was by no means a Marxist, this appraisal of materialism in the United States bears some similarity to the ideology of his more politically radical followers. Alas we shall never know what might have been the fate of psychoanalysis had it matured at its place of inception, had its presses not been seized, its books never burned, and its founders, most especially those on the ideological edge, allowed to continue amidst the intellectual and cultural traditions that nurtured them, voices in what was fast becoming an increasingly complex international movement.
Jacoby, not unlike Makari, suggests that a general conservatism instead affected all of psychoanalytic theory and praxis after the scare of the Holocaust. Steiner (2000) takes a similar position, and refers to the correspondence between A. Freud and Jones, among others, peppered with questions regarding one analyst's or another's entry into England or the USA. While Jones and Freud were interested in the candidate's level of scholarship, a strict test was also loyalty to the cause, or to metapsychology. Of equally great concern was the impression one might make in their new environs. Jones speaks of a certain analyst's "unmannerliness", (p. 140) as a problem, for who knew how quickly the refugees might wear out their welcome?
Once ensconced in the New World, particularly, an orthodoxy regarding the primacy of sexuality, the frequency of analytic sessions, the training of lay analysts, and so forth, all seem to support Jacoby's conclusions about a highly regulated and rigid psychoanalysis after the Holocaust. Whatever political and economic factors in Europe and moreover in America helped to support the tenor of the era, I would add a more psychodynamic force to the mix, or a re- enactment of the trauma of exclusion and exile. Rather than psychoanalytic renegades or moreover moderates, perhaps some of the refugees preferred the role of gatekeeper anointed with what in those circles was the Godlike distinction of Training Analyst, (Kirsner, 2000) titans in a club where small differences were exploited. Could it be that the specter of authoritarian hierarchies made the possibility for a shared, and less fixed relatedness a greater challenge? The unacknowledged traumatic nature of past maltreatment perhaps surfaced, as Richman (1996) explains, "not as a verbal narrative, but as symptom or reenactment." (641)
Henry Krystal
Indeed aspects of the ossified, unyielding behavior among post war psychoanalysts are reminiscent of the trauma response outlined by the theorist and clinician Henry Krystal. Himself a concentration camp survivor, Krystal's efforts reveal an avid focus, rather than the more typical inattention to the psychic impact of overwhelming experiences. He maps reactions to catastrophe as a progression from excitability towards an emotional and even physical rigidity and disengagement, certainly a caricature of the ideal 1950's training analyst, but not without some likeness to the model. Such stereotypic movements and reactions, Krystal explains, provide a shield against any further affective siege upon the psyche. Despite his classical psychoanalytic training and his loyalty to the orientation, Krystal (1966, 1972) recognizes that traumatized patients require a rich mix of cognitive and affective intervention in order to tolerate and integrate what has been unbearable.
That Krystal (1972) noted the usefulness of support and education to his patients struggling with their feelings, and recommended that the therapist expose some of his own emotion in order to model for the dissociated or overwhelmed sufferer, contradicted official rules of analytic abstinence and neutrality. Thus for many years his prescient work was presented only as it applied in the therapy of "unanalysable" patients whose trauma history prompted addictions or severe character pathology.
His was not only considered a more "active" or supportive form of treatment than was psychoanalysis, but, moreover, Krystal's area of focus was not deemed truly psychoanalytic because he privileged actual horror over intrapsychic conflict, horror that may have occurred in adulthood, rather than originating in childhood "fixation". (In response to Krystal's (1984) comment that Jews infused with the trauma of the Holocaust struggle along with all trauma victims to have faith, Bergmann makes the statement that "When Krystal is entering into this controversy, he is entering into it as a feeling Jew, but not, in my opinion, as a psychoanalyst." (p.225-226)) Thus, what Krystal was doing could only be termed "psychoanalytic psychotherapy" at best. That many people undoubtedly benefited from Krystal's intervention in a manner in keeping with, and even promoting a deep analytic inquiry probably could not have been published at the time of writing, and Krystal's narrative is careful to avoid such assertions. As in the case of Hartmann, some of his unconventional ideas are relegated to a footnote. (1972, p. 194 ) Today psychoanalysts of all sorts reference him. Is it our distance from his trauma that which allows us to emerge from a rigid, repetitive template towards a greater appreciation and awareness of the psychoanalytic uses of this and a myriad of other theoretical and practical ideas?
Heinz Kohut
Take another example of a struggle for and against self expression, this time in the life of Heinz Kohut. Kohut escaped from Vienna to America via England, and wanted nothing more than to be an integral part of his new society, in fact to become a personage in the most respected and powerful psychoanalytic organizations in the USA. (Strozier, 1972) Kohut's orthodoxy during much of his professional life may betray something of his narcissistically vulnerable character, a tendency that could only be exacerbated by his history of expulsion. According to Kohut's biographer Strozier, Kohut was bursting with new and controversial ideas of his own that he mostly suppressed, or tried to reconcile with accepted Freudian doctrine. In his promoting a separate developmental line for the emergence of the "self", Kohut claimed to be placing "new wine in old bottles" (1972, p.11) Yet the Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke is a more appropriate metaphor for the tortured language and logic of his first book. It is not until he knows he is dying of Leukemia that Kohut, who laughingly refers to having made himself into "Mr. Psychoanalysis", (Strozier, p. 1 27 ) finally uses his own independent voice.
This voice, however rich and profound, continues to betray his desire for normality and inclusion, despite any private experience or circumstance to the contrary. He views aggression, for example, as reactive rather than primary, or a response to a threat to the patient's self. As an outgrowth of this conceptualization, Kohut insists upon the therapeutic stance of empathy as opposed to confrontation and interpretation of a patient's rage, a tack perhaps reminiscent of the Christian doctrine of "turning the other cheek". Whether or not this stance is helpful (and as a clinician I myself can find it quite helpful at times) for the purposes of my discussion its rigidity suggests it is over determined, possibly a part of Kohut's lifelong ambivalence, but particularly his post war denial of his Jewish background. That is, alongside a burgeoning intellectual openness and creativity, Kohut also constructed what Strozier (2007, in press) calls "a thick tissue of lies" regarding his Jewishness, including the myth that his mother was born a Catholic, and "dragged him off to church every Sunday" during his childhood. Kohut's protégéé Ernest Wolf (1996) notes that his initial fear and dislike of a "Teutonic", Aryan sounding Kohut was based on his own Holocaust trauma as a German Jew persecuted and expelled from Hitler's Third Reich. What is astonishing in Wolff's recollection is that Kohut reportedly provided no clues, even after the two men became intimates, that despite his accent and mien he, too, was of Jewish, if assimilated parentage, and fled Austria. Wolf ends stating, "Even though my own Jewish identity has never been questioned by myself or by others, it has presented me with enough serious problems to make it quite easy for me to understand that one might not want to call attention to one's Jewish lineage." (p.3) Perhaps easy to understand, but nonetheless not a thing Wolff, nor most refugees, did, or supposedly would do.
Kohut once responded to a journalist's question regarding his interest in narcissism by referring to his expulsion from Vienna, stating, "I've led two totally different, perhaps unbridgeable lives", (italics mine) which he claims made him "alert to the problems of the fragmented self and how it tries to cure itself." (Quinn, 1980, p.124. quoted in Marcus, et al, 1983, p.88) It tries to cure itself, and at what cost?
Michael Basch, a German Jewish refugee from the Holocaust who was both Kohut's analysand and a member of a group of younger analysts who formed around Kohut , relates a revealing memory in this regard. Having just spoken in his native tongue at a small dinner party in which Kohut participated, Basch recalls Kohut turning to him and exclaiming, "I didn't know you spoke German!" (Strozier, 2001, p. 187) What more dramatic suggestion of an unconscious or dissociated relationship to his history- Kohut's "two unbridgeable lives"- than this moment?
In what might be construed as another revisionist turn, Kohut's landmark work "The two analyses of Mr. Z" (1979) is reminiscent of the relationship between the Old and New Testament. (D.M. Rappaport, personal communication) Mr.Z. (most likely Kohut himself according to Strozier and others) is at first made aware of his unconscious aggressive wishes and conflicts by the analyst who expects a level of personal responsibility and acceptance of the "laws" which govern society or reality. But a second, more empathic analyst appears, not unlike in the second coming, and provides the antidote to the Freudian/ Old Testament God of reckoning. Perhaps Kohut preferred the "loving- kindness" of Christian doctrine to the more legalistic Torah and a "vengeful" God, regardless of the rabid anti Semitism that turned his life upside down. Yet his ever increasing denial of his own history and heritage, as well as such details as his request that a hymn by Martin Luther (!) be played at his funeral (Strozier, 2001, p.380) further suggests the dissociation from his identity as a persecuted Jew, even a modicum of Jewish self hate.
My interpretation of Kohut's behavior and ideas is a leap taken towards the possibility that he, and other victims of the Holocaust may in part dissociate from, and moreover internalize the aggression directed against them. While this can facilitate an identification with the aggressor and fealty to the victor, a more provocative possibility regards one of the most important schisms in our field--that which disputes the primacy of aggression in narcissism and other "character" pathology. Might we wonder whether Kohut's side of the argument is to some degree fueled by the unmetabolized trauma of the Holocaust?
Certainly Kohut's contribution is much more than a reflection of his own struggle with the hate and loss he suffered as a Jewish victim of the Holocaust. In fact, Kohut's willingness to welcome, rather than to interpret the patient's beleaguered subjectivity, to be available instead as a "self object" in order to reinvigorate the development of identity, all serve as a remedy for the very rigid and proscribed post -Holocaust psychoanalytic norms and therapeutic engagement heretofore noted. Enriched by even greater flexibility and an emphasis on the intersubjectivity in the dyad, his legacy helps to keep psychoanalysis vital today.
And just as Fromm's heavy handed directives seem appropriate to the situation in which he found himself, so Kohut's focus on the self may address post Holocaust angst regarding the specter of annihilation. As Wangh (1983) notes, rather than emphasize intrapsychic conflict, "the preoccupation with 'narcissism' is, in my opinion, an outgrowth of the experience of the Nazi Holocaust…The question 'shall man exist'?" Can man exist?" is to be faced. "(p. 209) Kohut's more pointed concern regarding how man is to exist-deadened or enlivened, compromised or self possessed- may further serve as some redress to the psychic violence against the human being as a unique subject, perhaps among the most horrific of Nazi crimes.
Psychoanalytic theory's immersion in context may thus be inevitable. When inhumanity threatens, a moral imperative seems to have contributed to Fromm's insistence on the individual voice in the consulting room, or Kohut's banking of his own subjectivity in order to restore a patient's beleaguered self. Fromm's assertiveness or Kohut's reticence counter Bergman's characterization of a psychoanalytic theory and praxis unaffected by the Holocaust in its midst. Hartmann's focus upon the patient as agent of her defensive or adaptive behavior, developed at a time when fascism threatened all manor of personal preference, also stands in opposition to Bergmann's conclusion.
The same persecution, terror and expulsion that may have helped to shore up humanistic, liberal ideals in psychoanalysis also contributed to its severity. As I have attempted to argue, an at least partially defensive veneration of Freud, prompting diffidence among ambitious, creative innovators like Hartmann can be understood as a response to catastrophic losses and incomplete mourning for a broken past.
Fromm's ultimatums in the consulting room and Klein's interpretations untouched by culture and history are not unlike the 'paranoid schizoid' reactivity that Klein herself offers as a result of the individual's perceived, and in this case actual threat to self.
In fact the majority of post-war psychoanalytic institutions maintained rather unyielding rules of engagement and theories of therapeutic action. There was little room for independent variables such as culture or the analyst's subjectivity. Politicized clinicians such as the Marxist Fenichel embraced a more conventional life in McCarthy's 1950's America, and psychoanalysis itself, for better and worse, became as mainstream as any other medical specialty.
If patients complained of disturbances that were to a significant degree a result of the Holocaust, or to actual traumatic events, they were relegated to the hinterlands of 'psychotherapy,' as the early research and recommendations of Henry Krystal clearly indicate. In this way psychoanalysis was free from challenges to the intrapsychic model as outlined by a reified metatheory. Moreover, psychoanalysts themselves were protected from their own traumatic history.
Of course it is easier to pinpoint the inhibitions, identifications, and repetitions that beset our traumatized founding forefathers and mothers than it is to deconstruct and understand the impact of our own traumas on our lives and work. Current events are always the most distant from self-reflexivity. Each generation must seek out a position from which to both cope and yet act. Gerson evokes the importance of what many psychoanalysts have come to know as "the third" in this almost impossible endeavor, that space between "the scream and the silence."
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Emily Kuriloff, Psy.D.
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Ekuriloff@aol.com
Emily Kurilof
New YorK
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