http://www.sectionfive.org/ Our New Name Please note our new name. The Sphi.... http://www.sectionfive.org/?permanent=5.85 David Lichtenstein 2008-06-24T10:42:37-08:00
Please note our new name. The Sphinx is an enigmatic character: sometimes woman sometimes man, part human part beast, neither silent nor discursive. The Sphinx poses a question. Like the psychoanalyst the Sphinx is not the one who knows but the one who may provide the condition for new knowledge. This is the spirit of The Sphinx as a site of inquiry on the web, a site where psychoanalytic inquiry takes place. We invite you to engage The Sphinx. Post your inquiries. Submit your hypotheses, half formed queries, and open questions. This site is open to all to read and to respond. All members of Division 39 may join: click 'register' and you are then free to enter into discussions and post replies.

Please note: Your user name and password will be sent to you automatically when you register. If you don't see it in your email inbox check to see if it went into your spam folder. If you have any questions or problems registering, please contact us directly.]]> The Special Enough Child? A patient says (in so.... http://www.sectionfive.org/?permanent=5.84 David Lichtenstein 2008-06-24T10:38:59-08:00
A patient says (in so many words), "I know I'm not the center of your universe and not the only person to whom you're important... but I can still feel Special Enough to trust this process we are in together and allow it to help me without undermining things." Clearly the analyst has created a holding environment and is behaving as a Good-Enough mother. But what processes are actually at play in the patient?

Winnicott's good-enough mother is by now quite usefully ubiquitous. But I wonder what exists, qualitatively, on the other side of the dyad. A special-enough child? With so much focus on the interrelatedness of mother/child throughout early development, surely the presence of a good-enough mother is not the sole guarantee of success. Neither does not-quite-good-enough mothering doom every child to the same sealed fate. So what are the achievements and contributions of the child with (and without) good-enough mothering? What is her experience? At the other side of symbiotic merger, does the child perceive coming into her own existence? Winnicott says the infant goes from requiring a mother-person's full-time presence simply to exist ("there is no such thing as a baby") to an awareness of dependence on an object who must be shared with others. That seems a rather challenging leap, one requiring both intraspychic and relational scaffolding for safe passage. How does the child let go of the idea that its own wishes for things (including for a perfect mother) makes them so? How does she grasp that it is mother's choice to meet her needs, and how might it come about that such awareness does not wipe out or subsume the child's agency in wanting? Perhaps there is something about feeling she is special-enough to her good-enough mother to risk the transitions towards increasing autonomy. Being too special leaves the child no room to see herself as effective (all good is the work of the Perfect Mommy - I can't be trusted to get anything that right). Being not special enough keeps the child imprisoned in a non-responsive environment, where there is no evidence that wishes initiate or deserve met needs, and thus no sense of being worthy.


(I'd be happy to know about writers who take up this perspective, and/or of concepts I may have misread!) --Priscilla Butler]]> Editor's Note: What follows are the complete text.... http://www.sectionfive.org/?permanent=5.82 David Lichtenstein 2008-05-19T04:52:42-08:00 What follows are the complete texts of two papers that were presented in slightly shorter versions at the recent meeting of Division 39 in NY (April 2008). They are introduced by a new discussion written by Ghislaine Boulanger.
The papers present how the psychoanalytic field has addressed and failed to address the psychic meaning of profound historical and social trauma in general and in particular those associated with Nazism and the Holocaust.

Please send us your responses and comments.




From Dissociation and Denial into Meaningless:
A Response to Kuriloff and Prince
Ghislaine Boulanger, Ph.D.

This response cannot possibly do justice to the breadth and scholarship of Kuriloff's and Prince's papers; their conclusions are so far-reaching, the ripples assume tsunami-like proportions for psychoanalysis. I don't have the luxury of time to reflect on all the points they make, yet the luxury of time and distance to reflect will turn out to be a key part of my brief response to their work.
Last fall I supervised a case conference in a clinical psychology program in a New York area university. The patient being presented was a refugee from Africa, where he had been tortured and imprisoned and his wife raped by his torturers. I won't go into the abject details of his life in New York as he awaited political asylum and the various tortures he, in turn, visited on the young woman who was presenting this difficult case. The chair of the program had brought my book Wounded by Reality to the presentation so, in introducing me, he could explain why he had invited me to supervise this case. One senior faculty member picked my book up off the table, and, without bothering to conceal his contempt, said, "Reality, Ghislaine, haven't you gotten past ideas like that yet!"
I responded, "When reality hits you in the face, it's hard to look away." But, in fact, as these presentations have shown us, I was wrong (and later I'll tell you why I was right too), psychoanalytic theory has aided and abetted those who can dissociate in the face of reality.
Bob and Emily have given us two rich and thought provoking presentations about how our psychoanalytic forbears in America looked away when reality hit them in the face. And, how the consequences of that reaction – in some cases for better (as Emily points out in describing our contemporary emphasis on the self inherited from Fromm and Kohut), but most often for worse -- continue to reverberate on an institutional level through psychoanalytic training programs, though our theories, our practice, and in some graduate programs. American psychoanalysis carries within its theory and the very structure of its institutions the legacy of the Holocaust.
It is quite an irony that trauma originally inhered in the very concept of psychoanalysis, a theoretical and clinical discipline constituted by Freud's and Breuer's discovery that the psyche's failure to metabolize trauma has long lasting unconscious consequences. And psychoanalysts spent the rest of the next century trying to erase this fact from their collective memory. Putting aside what has been written about the political pressures to abandon the theory of seduction, in his biography of Freud, Darkness in the Midst of Vision, Breger argues that Freud privileged the Oedipal drama over earlier development because his own early traumatic losses and disappointments lead to such vulnerability and feelings of helplessness that the fantasy of an oedipal victory was much more empowering to Freud.
And fifty years later, as these papers – "like a series of electric shocks" -- show us, our psychoanalytic forebears, refugees from Hitler and the Holocaust, spent their professional lives persuading themselves and their patients that psychic reality trumps real life events every time. Bob suggests that the next generation of psychoanalysts in America can be compared to second generation Holocaust survivors. As with the victims of all received trauma, their characters and, in this case, their theory and their attitude to the outside world were shaped by what had been transmitted to them. They became more and more inward looking, clinging unawares to the unexplored realities of their parents' trauma. Worse, when these inevitable frailties, these necessary defenses against terror or despair, that will occur when there are no others to help us titrate our appreciation of what has happened to us, (and here I'm thinking not only of Hartman, but also of Fenichel and Jacobson) the danger comes when these reactions are codified, reified, become the letter of the law. As Bob points out, the interrupted mourning of the founders of American psychoanalysis has become part of the group process. A mindless application of a theory that is out of touch with people's lives, but served a protective purpose earlier, became the new orthodoxy. An in-group and an out-group were created, and those who didn't adhere to the fundamentals of this law were assigned to the out group. In the fifties, sixties, seventies and later, those who spoke out about reality were stigmatized, pathologized, relegated to the hinterlands of "psychotherapy." Times are changing however, today the worst that can happen to me for not submitting to this orthodoxy is that I get sneered at when I supervise a case conference – and then I get invited to present on the topic of reality!
While I find Bob's analogy to second generation Holocaust survivors compelling, I am also reminded of the inhabitants who were discovered in the last century in the West Virginia and Kentucky hollows in the Appalachian Mountains who had retained the customs, accents, and music of their Scots-Irish forbears who had themselves immigrated to these villages some 200 years earlier. So isolated were they from the rest of the world, they were completely out of step with changing times not only in America but also in their countries of origin (See Sherman and Henry, 1933). Theirs is the solution to the classic emigrants' dilemma writ large. It is a conscious and/or unconscious determination to preserve continuity with the country of origin. An attempt to deny the pain of loss and to avoid the feeling of not belonging to the larger culture led these Scots-Irish villagers to put boundaries around their own narrow world and privilege continuity over innovation. So Hartman downplays his own vitality in the service of continuity. While Fromm, another kind of immigrant, determined to embrace the new world and to repudiate Nazi imperialism, organizes his own theory to privilege agency and personal subjectivity, but in so doing also abandons a more nuanced psychoanalytic stance.
If the emigrants from Europe were simply dealing with the consequences of immigration, that would have been one thing, but for them it was a double whammy, not only were they exiled from their own country and culture, but many of them were survivors of Hitler's persecution of the Jews.
As Emily quoting Paul Russell reminds us, trauma always involves some failure of recognition. In the short run, in the midst of loss or in recovery after trauma, it takes the presence of a steadfast witness who does recognize and is prepared to acknowledge and explore the ways in which the psyche will twist and turn to escape painful and unalterable facts A witness who understands that, when the psyche can get away with it, avoidance, denial, dissociation, disavowal, and revision become ways of tolerating the intolerable so that we can get up each morning and take care of what has to be done. So Bergmann says, the central experience of his adulthood, did not impact psychoanalytic technique, Hartmann says he suffered "not at all" from the conditions in Nazi Germany (despite having a Jewish wife). Bob recounts a telling vignette where the attendees at the last Psychoanalytic Congress before World War II, nearly all of them Jews, whispered together about their plans for escape in the breaks between papers that were devoted to psychoanalytic theory. I am reminded of Margaret Little's story of Winnicott getting up during a meeting of the British Psychoanalytical Society to point out that there is an air raid going on. I use this vignette as a parable to demonstrate how privileging psychic reality at the cost of traumatic reality renders our theories meaningless. What need is there for bomb shelters when psychic reality protects us from global conflicts?
And the tradition continues, Emily begins her paper with the decision at the White institute to continue their case conference on 9/11, some participants experiencing relief on being reminded that, when asked how she would respond to the declaration of war, Fromm Reichman had said, "I will do what I do best, psychotherapy,"
And she may have, but when it came to working with immediate survivors, Fromm Reichman was much wiser than that, she counseled stepping out of the traditional role to offer physical and moral support to survivors in the immediate aftermath. She adapted her techniques to suit the crisis at hand.
I said above that I was, nonetheless, correct when I replied that when reality hits you in the face, it's hard to look away: I have just come back from a trip to Israel where I was invited to speak to the psychology faculty and graduate students at the University of Haifa. I was getting more and more nervous about that talk. Firstly, given the fate of psychodynamic thinking in most American university psychology departments, not to mention in the field of traumatology in general, I thought I would meet with complete incredulity as I offered a dynamic understanding of adult onset trauma. Secondly, I figured they hardly needed to hear from me, they knew so much more than I did about the topic. One of them said to me, confirming my worst fears just before my lecture, "A year ago this university was under siege from Lebanon, rockets were landing all around us."
I was astonished and moved by the reception I got. Not only did they welcome my ideas, they were hungry for them. They had little patience with stories about the denial of reality by American psychoanalysts, they were in the midst of reality. But, and here's what struck me as so powerfully, while they all had questions about countertransference and technique, none of them could think beyond the clinical work they were doing. They themselves were traumatized, several of them multiply traumatized, and they were working with patients who shared these experiences, they couldn't escape it. In the face of an overwhelming reality, they had to adapt, but they didn't know how to think about it. As Eliot says in the Four Quartets "We had the experience, but missed the meaning,' And I was reminded once again that one of the consequences of trauma is the failure of symbolic functioning.
As I thought about this, I felt much more compassion about the necessary denials of our forebears and some understanding of the second generation, like the professor who ridiculed my interest in reality, but I also wondered about future generations of psychoanalysts– assuming that they are coming along. How will they judge our struggle to incorporate the reality of the war on terror, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the erosion of our civil liberties, widespread poverty in the face of plenty, and our professional association's moral failure to stand up for the rights of the disenfranchised in these wars, into our practice as psychoanalysts. I hope that the pioneering work of Lynne Layton and her colleagues in bringing these realities into the consulting room heralds a return to the earliest days of psychoanalysis that Russell Jacoby describes in The Repression of Psychoanalysis. This was the era before Hitler, before exile, and before Fenichel, Jacobson, Annie Reich and many others had to purge their thinking of any dangerously left wing political or social commitments in order to fit in to the new world.
References:
Boulanger, G. 2007 Wounded by Reality: Understanding and Treating Adult Onset Trauma. The Analytic Press, Mahwah, N.J.
Breger, L.(2001), Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision. New York, Wiley.
Eliot, T.S. (1997/1943). The Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Layton, L., Hollander, N., and Gutwill, S (2006), Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting. New York: Routledge.
Jacoby, R. (1983) The Repression in Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sherman, M. and Henry, T (1933), The Hollow Folk]]> Theory as Trauma A foray into applied psychoanal.... http://www.sectionfive.org/?permanent=5.79 David Lichtenstein 2008-04-21T09:19:18-08:00 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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47. Wolf, E. (1996) The Viennese Chicagoan In: Heinz Kohut and the Psychology of the Self. Alan Siegal, Ed. New York: Routledge

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Emily Kuriloff, Psy.D.
5 West 86th Street 1B-B
New York, New York 10024
Ekuriloff@aol.com



Emily Kurilof
New YorK]]> DRAFT THEORY AS THICK DESCRIPTION[1] Robert P.... http://www.sectionfive.org/?permanent=5.77 David Lichtenstein 2008-04-21T06:35:24-08:00 THEORY AS THICK DESCRIPTION[1]

Robert Prince, Ph.D.

The question, How did the cataclysm that befell Europe during the Holocaust effect Psychoanalysis?—has been seriously neglected if not repressed. An attempt to consider this question leads immediately to trying to understand its avoidance, and implications of its avoidances for psychoanalytic institutions and ideas.

Psychoanalysis is a survivor of the Holocaust. Certainly we approach all survivors, even those who happen to be psychoanalysts, with care, partly because of our own dread and awe and their sensitivity acknowledging the impact of the external world on their lives and especially to attributions of damage. If insight amounts to shining a light on something that is, in Salberg's(2007)felicitous phrase, "hidden in plain sight." then Emily Kuriloff's decision to look at six psychoanalytic theorists in the context of their personal Holocaust experience is a stunning illumination. To use a concept from anthropology, Kuriloff "thickly" (Geertz,C.1973) describes psychoanalytic theory by adding this layer of historical context. The goal of my discussion is to provide further historical support and elaboration regarding the perspective that Kuriloff brings to psychoanalytic ideas.

While most psychoanalysts aspire to support theory by clinical observation, lurking just beneath this surface objectivity is a passion about our psychoanalytic beliefs that becomes all too apparent when they are challenged. The broad range of often maddeningly inconsistent or contradictory tenets of diverse psychoanalytic theorists has gradually necessitated a recognition that in addition to its being a limiting factor, a theorists' subjectivity can also significantly enhance the dimensions of theoretical constructs(Stolorow R., Atwood, G. , 1979) One such aspect of theory, rarely discussed but especially salient in psychoanalysis, is its social function. Shared tenets provide a unique cohesiveness. Freud eloquently expressed this idea with reference to Judaism on his reception by representatives of the Hebrew Community of London who greeted him in 1938 after his flight from Vienna :" "We Jews have always known how to respect spiritual values. We preserved our unity through ideas, and because of them we have survived through this day. ( Diller J.,1991, p. 122 ) " In her essay Kuriloff goes as far as to suggest that this need for unity in the face of Nazi persecution left theory nearly sacrosanct, so that creative innovators may have had to struggle to find their voices. It is not exaggeration to say that the price of continuity and belonging was for some analysts a strict adherence to a set of theoretical constructs. In some groups the boundaries of ideas were so narrow that transgressing them fractures personal relationships as well as risks expulsion from the group. The ultimate psychoanalytic insult is "superficiality" , and many of the theorists who included a cultural dimension particularly feared disparagement as "mere sociologists." Here is another possible contribution of the silence regarding the impact of the Holocaust. Nevertheless it is an unacknowledged truism that psychoanalytic theories are always located in a wider social context and understanding the context gives breath to understanding the theory.

One context for psychoanalysis is its origins during the struggle for emancipation and assimilation of Middle European Jews (Diller,J 1991, Oxaal, I.,1998, Sallberg, J. 2007) Jews not only constituted the overwhelming majority of the new science but also had, as a primary objective, precisely so it would not be regarded as a Jewish science, attracting non-Jews to the fold. At the same time, the expansion of psychoanalysis after World War I coincided with the rise of Nazism and the ultimate annihilation of not only the original centers of psychoanalysis in Vienna and Berlin but also of European Jewery.

Kuriloff frames her discussion within the social context of modern day terrorism, or the decision to go on with a psychoanalytic meeting at the William Alanson White Institute as the twin towers were literally falling. This scene evokes a eerily similar story of a meeting of the Prague Psychoanalytic Society chaired by one of Kuriloff's subjects, Otto Fenichel. Also in the midst of an historical emergency-- the Anschluss on March 18, 1938-- a group of psychoanalysts gathered around the radio are considering canceling the reading of a paper by Dr. Hannah Heilbrun .Fenichel evokes a story of his father. Anxious about an ill family member, the elder Fenichel refuses dinner until mother tempts him by telling him that his favorite roasted meats are being served. Father's mood lifts and he says that such fare is welcome on any occasion. Fenichel draws a parallel to psychoanalysis, and just , as dinner was served, so, too, the meeting was held (Simmel, E.,1946 ). The story, however, does not solve the problem. Although it strives for an heroic enunciation of an ideal by gamely disavowing a grave threat, anxiety lurks. A similar scene occurred later that same year at the Psychoanalytic Congress in Paris, the last one before the war. The assembled analysts do the psychoanalytic business of attending papers while in the spaces between they discuss with one another their plans for escape As Meszaros (1998) writes, "During the presentations, the participants dealt with internal psychic events, and in the breaks, they discussed the threatening external reality. All personal concerns revolved around the question of emigration (p.211)." Although this may have been the only means by which the meetings-and by extension the supportive experience of a professional 'society'- could continue at all; in an ironic inversion , the real depth seems to be located in conscious concerns about reality while the superficial is located in the presentations about the unconscious and psychical reality.

While all of these vignettes speak to a denial or dissociation during a catastrophe,the degree of post war dissociation of Holocaust trauma is also quite evident, and not only among the theorist/victims themselves. The majority of psychoanalysts notoriously minimized if not ignored the significance of the Holocaust in the analyses of survivor, and later children of survivors analysands. In the first three decades after the end of World War II, the literature was sparse. Bettleheim's (1942) and Niederland's (1961,1964) articles in which the term "survivor syndrome" was given currency appeared outside of psychoanalytic publications. 1 In an added irony, Axelrod et. al. ( 1980) published a study of the in-patient charts of hospitalized children of survivors in the very same journal Niederland (1961) had published his landmark article almost twenty years before. In an era in which extensively detailed histories were an integral part of hospital case records, Axelrod found that a history of parents' survivorhood was still overwhelmingly omitted.

The neglect in psychoanalytic writing seemed to mirror neglect in clinical work. Henry Krystal 's watershed Massive Psychic Trauma was published in 1968 and was the first comprehensive presentation of clinical findings by leading psychiatrists. Judith Kestenberg, another of the pioneers in the field, who was to organize a Study Group of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1974, sent out several hundred questionnaires in preparation for a congress on child psychiatry to be held in 1970 in Israel. (Bergmann,M., Jucovy, M. ,1982) Her results "enabled her draw more conclusions about the analysts that the patients. She found that many analysts showed an amazing indifference to the problems, and that many were startled because it had never occurred to them to link their patient's dynamics to the history of their parents' persecution (pp. 26-27)."

As Kuriloff notes in her discussion, Krystal's work was extolled in the growing trauma and survivor literature. However, it was marginalized by mainstream psychoanalysis. A central theoretical obstacle in attending to survivor dynamics has been the antimony in psychoanalysis between psychic reality and external reality. Boulanger, (2007), for example, has written extensively about the challenge to psychoanalytic theory posed by adult onset trauma. Confronted with overpowering reality, it seems that psychoanalysts retreat to the primacy of infantile phantasy. The connection between Holocaust trauma and the patient is minimized or avoided. For example, Freedman (1978) reports his analysis of a patient who had developed an unusual perversion. When anxious, he would seek barbers of very specific appearance and provoke them with complaints that they were not shaving him closely enough, particularly around the throat. During these encounters he masturbated under the sheet. The patient had lost his family in the Holocaust. A hero of the Warsaw Ghetto, he had been a partisan fighter who strangled the enemy with wire and was finally interned in Bergen-Belsen until the end of the war. None of these facts were integrated with the content or meaning of his perversion, and instead, the analysis was conducted entirely on the basis of the interplay of "primitive and oedipal elements (p749) " with bare reference to the role of his Holocaust experiences. The case, or more accurately the "classical" approach to it , has since attracted much discussion ,(Blum, 1978; Roiphe 1978; Oliner, 1996, 2000; Scharff,1998 ) and appreciation for some of the intertwining of early experience with adult trauma (Oliner, 1996) and emphasis on the role early pathology in the unfolding of the effects of later trauma. (Scharff, 1998).

Kohut's (1971) Mr. A. also had a childhood history of persecution when his family was forced to flee the Nazis twice, at ages 6 and 8. When Kohut was asked by Kestenberg (1982) to "provide the material that would allow us to search a connection of the pathology with Holocaust experiences , he felt certain that such a connection did not exist (p.41). " Kuriloff has suggested that such adamant denial of the Holocaust stem in part from Kohut's own defensive anti Semitism.

The strongly held theoretical justifications for holding on to the classical view are put in some perspective by the following observation of Hochman (1978) from a psychoanalytic clinic in a major city cited by Wilson and Fromm (1982), "Two cases came up for discussion, where social and ethnic factors were important. One was an Irish Catholic and one was the daughter of Polish Jews. While there was an extensive discussion about the importance of the cultural factors in the first case, there was little such discussion in the second case, with no recognition of the importance of the Holocaust. … Many analysts have been affected directly and indirectly by the Holocaust. In spite of extensive analytic discussions of the death instinct and murderous and sadistic fantasies, discussions of murderous and sadistic reality take on an unsettling presence in the analyst's consulting room (p. 290)." .

The six theorists that Dr. Kuriloff chooses highlight the most salient- and overlooked- characteristic of both survivors and of analysts – namely how different they all are. Their heterogeneity conflicts with our desire to make neat categories based on similarities. In fact common traumatic experiences produced highly individual effects. But their experiences were in fact quite varied. While all endured significant danger and losses , the quality and degree varied. One important difference was when they escaped (Hale,N., 1995,Eisold,K. 1998)As Kuriloff notes in her comparison of Klein and Fromm, analysts who emmigrated earlier, for example Horney, Alexander, and Rado, tended to be more adventuresome in their thinking, coming by invitation and choice, seeking opportunity. They may have planned to return. However, like Judith Kestenberg who had come to the United States to do research with Paul Shilder, they found themselves stranded. The later ones, who came by necessity and in desperation. tended to represent more mainstream psychoanalysis . Thus the backgrounds of persecution of the theorists Kuriloff presents are dramatically different from each other except with respect to the fact that a thick curtain has fallen over the entire era with the events relatively unknown despite the survival of the vast majority of analysts.
In fact very few were actually interned. The notable exceptions were Bruno Bettleheim who was a political prisoner in Dachau and Buchenwald between 1938 and 1939; Edith Jacobsen, some of whose patients were murdered and whose arrest in 1935 and incarceration over many months stirred fears she would be tortured to reveal names ; Karl Landauer, one of Fromm's analysts who with his family was stuck in Holland, died in Concentration Camp; the heroic John Rittmeister ,whose name seems to have been forgotten, one of two Christian analysts[2] who joined the resistance.





Most analyst got out of in time, which is not to say that their flight was without suffering. Although Anna Freud referred to it as a "new kind of Diaspora (Steiner, 1989) it was largely dissociated from institutional consciousness. Grinberg and Grinberg (1984) draw attention to the scant attention psychoanalysts have paid to migrations despite personal experience during their careers. Exact numbers are elusive but of the 2000 psychiatrists in Germany in 1933, 600 had left for 80 countries around the world by 1939 (Peters, U. 1988). By 1934, 24 of 36 full members of the German Psychoanalytic Society had managed to leave. Between 1938 and 1943, 149 analysts were aided in the emigration by a most ambivalent American Psychoanalytic Association and the Emergency Committee on Immigration (Hale,1995). The intent of that committee was equally to control the process of assimilation (Eisold, K., 1998); its charge stated 'the primary functions of the committee were to restrict and control immigration, to direct it to communities not already overcrowded, and to keep the teaching of analysis centered in the hands of our recognized teaching institutes' (Muhlleitner & Reichmayr, 1995, pp. 108-9).

Ernst Jones stands out as a eminence gris simultaneously raising funds and using influence with powerful figures of the day and also magisterially directing émigrés to various countries and even specific cities based on their politics, personality and above all their theoretical fealty (Hale,N.,1995, Roazen, P.,2001, Steiner,R., 1989) In contrast to the earlier group of refugees who were initially received as authorities and special teachers anointed by their personal contact with Freud, this group was greeted as if they were threats, interlopers demanding scarce resources, potential competitors for a diminishing patient pool. Lay analysts faced particular hurdles in America while medical analysts faced recertification in a foreign language. In the best of circumstances they faced humiliations that contrasted sharply with their previous positions as members of the psychoanalytic aristocracy. Princess Marie Bonaparte in a 1943 letter to her son from South Africa writes, :"Its horrible being a refugee. One is a 'nuisance' to everybody, and, oh, don't they just let you feel it. (de Mijola,1993, p139 )"
Fredrick Wyatt who left Austria in 1934 and returned to teach in Germany in 1974 bitterly describes the refugees as suffering rebuffs, scrounging for a living, learning a new language and mores and feeling helpless. He goes on to describe withdrawal and resignation, a slow place of adaptation, the challenge learning idioms (Wyatt,F., 1988). He writes: " Adaptation to a new culture inevitably means giving up what, in essence, has been an integral part on one's self.(p.148)" In a similar voice, Paul Federn's son Ernst Federn (1988) writes, "I can now present to you adequately the true tragedy that befell psychoanalysis in exile. Not only did that exile mean the loss of home, but also the loss of language and the loss of philosophical bearings. This loss was all the harder to bear as language and philosophy also meant economic and social status (p. 158)."

If looking forward would be fraught, so to would be looking back. Anna Freud's use of the word "Diaspora" was of course reference to the result of the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The third temple was the Berlin Institute. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1988) writes, "Where the history of psychoanalysis under Nazi rule in Germany is concerned, it is almost as if one had quite literally obeyed the order: 'You are requested to close the eyes" appearing in one of Freud's dreams. One must not see (p. 1058).' With the ascension of the Nazis in 1933, Jews could no longer serve in the administration of medical societies and two members of the Berlin group who Would later be identified as confirmed Nazis (Roazen, 2001) , Felix Boehm and Carl Muller Braunschweig with Jones' support, approached Freud for his blessing taking over control of the Institute. Their purported aim was to preserve psychoanalysis in Germany until better times. However the exclusion of the Jews as part of official Nazi persecution was mirrored by the tacit collaboration by the non- Jewish members who remained. Thus Eichoff (1995) reports the bizarre scene in 1936 of two separate celebrations of Freud's birthday, one attended by Jewish, the other by non-Jewish members. The Berlin Institute would withdraw from the I.P.A. later that year and be absorbed into the Goring Institute where it would contribute ideological support for Nazi crimes against humanity. Not surprisingly, the events of these years raise a range of opinions. At one extreme, Peter Loewenberg, a historian and psychoanalyst judges the attempt to preserve the Berlin Institute harshly: "Freud was clearly more interested in preserving the organization and presence of psychoanalysis in the Third Reich than he was in the dignity and self-esteem of his Jewish colleagues or in the conditions that are necessary for psychoanalysis to function as a clinical therapy…. It is painful and mortifying to read the record of how the leaders of an honored institution, in order to save the organization and promote the careers of the new successors to leadership, humiliated and cast out a large majority of its members to accommodate to a totalitarian state. That a "scientific," or for that matter a "humanistic," society would exclude qualified members for ethnic, racial, religious, or other extrinsic grounds for the sake of the existence of the institution, defies the autonomy of science from political ideology and the morality of valuing individuals which is the humane liberal essence of psychoanalysis itself. [Cited in Roazen,P. 2001, pp. 23]"

In contrast Chasseguet-Smirgel (1988), in a review of Evard's (1984) Les Anees Brunes (The Brown Years) expresses suspicion of "these reproaches (p.1063)" and calls for " a little more Sorrow and a little more Pity (p 1065)." Recalling Freud's fateful meeting with Boehm, she repeats Lampl-de Groots report that Freud said to Boehm, " I have nothing to forbid them and nothing to demand of them," and then observes "Is not this remark, with all the scorn and bitterness of the world, totally in keeping with Freud's character? Moreover, is it really so extraordinary that the majority of Germans, and Freud too, were unable to predict the horrendous acts that were to follow? (p 1064)."

However, there is more to the narrative. In 1949 the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG) under Harald Schultz- Hencke petitioned the I.P.A. for re-admission and was granted provisional membership. The objection to full membership was not Nazi era misdeeds but rather questions about Schultz- Hencke's "neo-analytic perspective (Conci 2003,p 176) ", i.e. his deviations from adherence to classical Freudian theory. Consequently the German Psychoanalytical Association (DPV) formed under Muller- Braunschweig and was granted full membership in 1951. In a clear example of the the social function of theory ( Goggin J., Goggin E., 2001) conclude that theoretical orthodoxy was "one way of advertising one's dissociation from the Nazi past" ( p. 145).

The I.P.A. returned to hold a congress in Germany for the first time in 1986. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1987), served as program chair and in an exquisitely nuanced yet emotionally electric article, describes a meeting filled with tension above and below the surface. In particular she evokes the specter of the past and the present conflict between fear of and the need for remembering and understanding. She writes, cutting in several directions and through multiple time periods, "We must regretfully conclude that our analytical identity is fragile and that courage and independence of mind are rare (p.437.)" Chasseguet-Smirgel's account, whether one agrees with all of her conclusions, is written from the vantage of one is undeniably sees the world through the eyes of a thoroughly classical psychoanalyst, yet one who avoids using theory in the service of disassociation The result is a description of past events brought into the present that is nuanced, powerful and extremely uncomfortable.

Chasseguet-Smirgel's willingness to address the legacy of the Holocaust for psychoanalytic relations is unusual. However in the last twenty years there has been an increasing attention to the history and maladaptive aspects of psychoanalytic organization (Eisold K., 1994; Kirstner,D.,1998; Hale, N. 1995; Prince, R.1999; Roazen.P., 2001) . Few links, and these are usually in passing, are made to trauma. And most, in the spirit of Dr. Kuriloff's frequent wise reminders to appreciate complexity and repudiate reductionism, reflect multiple strands of explanation. However in a paper describing the history of French psychoanalysis during the Occupation, de Mijolla (2003) rhetorically asks: "How was it possible in these times of mistrust, impoverishment, and scarcity not to arouse deep-seated resentments, which were simply waiting for the right moment to manifest themselves?( p.155)"

The answer is: It wasn't. Authoritarianism, intolerance of dissent, betrayal, intimidation, all become evident in psychoanalytic institutions. Many of these organizations became dictatorships governed by what Kirsner(1998) called " a ruling clique." Schisms occurred in almost, if not all Europe, Australia, South America and in the new hubs replacing Vienna and Berlin, the United States and England. Henry Murray, of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, is reported to have commented on "an atmosphere too charged with humorless hostility … an assemblage of cultists, rigid in thought, armored against new ideas, and …ruthlessly rivalrous for power (quoted in Eisold, 1994, p. 786). Victor Rosen (cited by Kirsner, 1998) describes the isolation of the institutes from the surrounding communities. A series of "outposts" wishing the rest of the world would go away; a description eerily reminiscent of the isolation of survivor families. Eisold (1994) also describes " a psychoanalytic Weltanschauung that places the analyst, in his own mind, apart from the world within which he lives and works (p795.)." Such separation and isolation effectively results in making the psychoanalytic organization, like the survivor family, a kind of refuge from a threatening world that could be regarded with condescension or contempt.

In the U.S. , intensifying with the influx of the refugees, a second "Psychoanalytic Civil War (Hale,N. 1995)" is described between 1939 and 1942 with a particular battleground over who could be a training analyst. It pitted earlier and later arriviste and native American against each other and in shifting alliances with each other. The importance of the "training analyst" status and membership on the institute education committee is that represented the power basis guaranteed control of the power. According to Arnold Richards, (cited by Kirsner, D. 1998) once one became a training analyst one was almost like God and could do what one wanted. Analysts traced their "lineage" to Freud via their training analyst and this guaranteed the continuity of power going forward. In the post war years the Europeans kept to themselves and according to Kirsner (1998) did not socialize with their American counterparts. He writes, "Given the trauma and terror suffered by the Europeans during the 1930s together with their common background, it was understandable why they grouped together socially in the US. But this carried over to professional matters, leading to a climate of paranoia in the institute which affected all its members Like refugees throughout the ages, perhaps their experiences of persecution in Europe, followed by becoming refugees and living in a totally new environment predisposed them to being more defensive, to try to cover over their fears and insecurities with a strong need to achieve and to cling on to power (Chap. 1)." Both his and Kuriloff's text suggests that this conflagration is a repetition, or enactment, rather than an acknowledgement of the original trauma of living in an authoritarian society





Suffering different degrees of trauma, the psychoanalysts of Europe nevertheless shared the necessity of mourning . However to some degree they were faced with significant obstacles to completion of this vital task. The death of Freud, their totemic figure, was far overshadowed by their own enormous losses and the challenge to survive in a new, present reality. Varvin (1995) discuses the severe consequences when interrupted mourning becomes part of group process. He cites Volkan (1993) who wrote :" A group that has been persecuted transmits its grievance from one generation to the next… and the latest generation is psychologically motivated to repeat in one way or another symbolic or realistic derivatives of the event in order to change passivity into activity, and to correct wrongs done to the forbearers. (p.103)." The transposition of what Kirsner (1998) called " a fortress mentality" and other totalitarian themes into their current realities rises to the status of such "derivatives."




Can we identify broad dimensions of theory that are likely to show the impact of the Holocaust? For individuals who had endured such losses, would not the idealization and overvaluation of the ideas they brought with them, particularly the Freudian canon, even at the cost of rigidity and the inhibition of progress, be some kind of compensation? Would they fiercely protect this ideas both as a connection to a past and as a way of restoring lost status and self-esteem? A prime example of such an over valued idea is the extreme emphasis on psychic reality at the expense of the all too painful other kind. Closely related is the psychoanalytic theory of trauma. The continued post-war radical privileging of early childhood events in the face of massive adult trauma speaks to the operation of some defensive blinders. Another instance or the impact of history is the move in ego psychology pointed out by Hale (1995), away from hereditarian beliefs in reaction to the Nazi glorification of instinct and irrationality. The clinical theory emphasizing anonymity, with deep roots in Freud's writing if not his actual practice, bares a second look in light of the secretiveness of the group of analysts who dominated after World War II. For example, despite their predominant Jewish backgrounds, Ostow (1982) speaks of a "gentleman's agreement" among these analysts "one does not discuss Jewishness (p150) " For a group whose personal exposure brought such danger, it would make great adaptive sense, as again it did for survivors, to reveal as little of themselves as possible.



Perhaps the most important theoretical response to the Holocaust is the struggle to derive meaning and a reason for living - a theoretical phoenix rising from the ashes. Implicit in the thought of each of the psychoanalysts of the Holocaust is some transcendent response to it. Most concretely, Frankl titled his opus, Man's Search for Meaning. As Kuriloff notes, Kohut articulated the complementary visions of heroic and tragic man and the striving for the realization of the nuclear self. Fromm presented the goal of the development of a humanistic conscience. Fenichel's passion for psychoanalysis seems to have formed the basis of his own adaptation. In a review of Fromm's Escape from Freedom (Fenichel,O. 1954), he applauds Fromm's social interest as he criticizes his every deviation from Freudian thinking. Klein's world of internal objects persists regardless of the surround. Krystal addresses the completion of mourning as a necessity and a life goal. In a remarkable essay he writes that "heart of the work of psychoanalysis can be reviewed in two parts….(the second is ) the acceptance of the inevitability and necessity of every event which was part of one's life as having been justified by its causes. It may be said that the challenge in the acceptance of one's old age and the completion of psychoanalytic work is the same- to acquiesce and embrace what has happened and to renounce continuing anger about it. (Krystal,1995,p83). Even Bettelheim, lately castigated for his image of the concentration camp inmate, strove to develop a theory of autonomy.



Dr. Kuriloff's examination of psychoanalytic theory through the lens of the impact on it of historical trauma can potentially be taken as an attempt to pathologize and thus devalue.The sensitivity of both survivors and analysts to attribution based on trauma remains a concern. However, as pointed out by Rakoff, not to have been effected by such trauma is the true indictment of one's humanity. Personally, my own struggle to construct a view of the world and an image of human being has taken place in the shadow of my knowledge of the Holocaust. I freely admit the possibility of projection, but it seems there is ample evidence for the representation of Holocaust trauma in psychoanalytic theory and the further enactment of it in psychoanalytic institutions. Bringing the perspective of the traumatic context of a crucial period in psychoanalytic history is emphatically not intended to detract but to add a layer of understanding. Today's psychoanalysts are like the second generation offspring of survivors to whom Holocaust trauma was oftentimes unwittingly transmitted. Awareness of what is otherwise denied and enacted is essential to our understanding and moreover our sense of agency, both as professionals and as human beings. Recognizing that we are descendents both of an intellectual tradition and the historical context in which it was formed only deepens our appreciation of the legacy of our psychoanalytic mothers and fathers.







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________________________________________
[1] Originally presented as a Discussion of Dr. Emily Kuriloff's "Theory as Trauma" at the Clinical Conference of the William Alanson White Institute , New York April , 2007

1 A symposium sponsored by the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society was held in 1966 and in 1967 the International Psychoanalytic Association Congress in Copenhagen sponsored a symposium titled, "Psychic Traumatization through Social Catastrophe."
[2] Käte Dräger was the other. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1987). Cites the following from Dräger 's lecture delivered in 1970 to commemorate the Jubilee of the Berlin Institute: "We can ask after the event whether the analysts should not have all emigrated in 1933…. the chronicle of the years 1933–1945 would be easier to write if we could tell the tale today: At a certain point in the development of the situation, the "Aryan" analysts simply said "no" (p436)."

Robert Prince, Ph.D., ABPP
robertprincephd@verizon.net]]> At the Spring 2005 meeting of Division 39, Deborah.... http://www.sectionfive.org/?permanent=5.76 Henry M. Seiden 2007-06-28T06:05:00-08:00
"Thinking in the Space Between Winnicott and Lacan: Toward a New Middle Group?" She has kindly agreed to post it in our Essays section .

It is an intriguing study of two thinkers each who have had a complex and controversial relationship to their respective communities. As Luepnitz shows, they also had an interesting relationship to one another both personally and conceptually. The idea that we might think and work in ways that draw from both of these innovative figures is a promising and challenging notion. To integrate disparate approaches without overly diluting them is an admirable goal.

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And please send your comments and reactions.]]> Thinking in the Space Between Winnicott and Lacan:.... http://www.sectionfive.org/?permanent=5.75 Henry M. Seiden 2007-06-28T05:50:14-08:00
by Deborah Anna Luepnitz


Following André Green (1986), the author maintains that the two most original psychoanalytic thinkers since Freud were Donald Winnicott and Jacques Lacan. Whereas in the past the two attracted almost non-overlapping audiences, a recent trend shows more analysts making use of both humanist Winnicott and post-humanist Lacan. This paper contrasts their views of the aims of treatment, as well as their organizing tropes of selfhood vs. subjectivity. Gregory Bateson's notion of 'double description' (following C. S. Peirce's construct of 'abductive reasoning') is invoked to theorize the bringing into provocative contact of two radically different paradigms. A clinical vignette is offered to demonstrate crucial concepts from both traditions in practice. The author asks if we are on the brink of a new independent tradition or 'new Middle Group' comparable to the one that emerged in 1940s' London. The benefits and risks of working in the potential space between Lacan and Winnicott are discussed.


'In the same river, we both step and do not step, we are and we are not.'
—Heraclitus, Fragment 49a

'…What we saw and grasped, that we leave behind; but what we did not see and did not grasp, that we bring.'
—Heraclitus, Fragment 56

Following an interview in 1990, British Middle Group analyst Marion Milner showed me her paintings from the 1930s and '40s. Pointing to a medium-sized canvas with two hens tearing each other apart—blood and feathers flying—Mrs. Milner said: 'I like to say it's Anna Freud and Melanie Klein fighting over psychoanalysis.'

She was referring, of course, to the 1940s' battle that derailed careers, ended friendships and nearly destroyed the British Psychoanalytic Society. It culminated in the group's bifurcation into the A and B groups, each member asked to declare allegiance. The person who argued for the importance of both Klein and Anna Freud was Donald Winnicott, whose 'Middle Group' was to have a lasting impact on psychoanalytic thinking the world over. Few contemporary analysts, whether their primary identification be Freudian, Jungian, Kohutian or relational have not been influenced by constructs associated with Winnicott and the Middle Group such as: the transitional object, potential space, borderline states, the squiggle game—and perhaps most importantly—the clinical use of countertransference as a source of information about the analytic process.

Another schism in the psychoanalytic world occurred some 20 years later—this one ending with no comparable entente. I mean the IPA's expulsion of Jacques Lacan in 1963, and his establishment the following year of his own school, the École Française de Psychanalyse which was renamed the École Freudienne de Paris.

Following what Lacan referred to as his 'excommunication' from the IPA, he maintained a strained but professional relationship with Donald Winnicott. Lacan translated Winnicott's paper on the transitional object into French—certainly a sign of respect—but continued for years in his seminar to discount the British 'nurse analyst' who would turn Freud's radical project into a form of 'Samaritan aid' (Lacan, 1977a, p. 36).

Winnicott (1971) for his part, wrote: 'Jacques Lacan's paper Le Stade du Miroir (1949) has certainly influenced me…' (p. 111), but he neither described that influence nor appeared to comprehend Lacan's widely cited piece. Winnicott, who acknowledged in a letter to Ernest Jones 'a neurotic inhibition to reading Freud' (Winnicott, 1987, p. 33), not surprisingly found Lacan's re-reading of Freud incomprehensible.

Many followers of Lacan and of Winnicott perpetuated the non-reading or aggressive misreading of the other man. For example, Middle Group analyst Charles Rycroft wrote: '…I found his [Lacan's] writings a real load of rubbish' (Rycroft, 1985, p. 5).

Conversely, Jacques-Alain Miller argued against what he saw as Winnicott's ascendancy in France as the 'anti-Lacan' (Miller, 1981, p. 38). Miller felt that the preoccupation of Winnicott and the Middle Group with the role of the mother was almost fetishistic, leading inexorably to a perverse course of thought ('une propédeutique pérverse') (Miller, 1981, p. 43). The same position was taken by Laurent (1981).
Following the translation into English of the Écrits, Jacques Lacan developed a following among anglophone academics, and the obverse relationship between Lacan and Winnicott attracted critical interest. Numerous authors undertook to contrast the two psychoanalysts' theoretical positions, in most cases, tendentiously. Some argued against the familiar humanism of Winnicott and the Middle Group in favor of the brilliant, politically edgy Frenchman (Elliot, 1991; Finlay, 1989; Mitchell, 1982; Moi, 1985; Ragland-Sullivan, 1986; Rose, 1982).

Others campaigned instead for the delightfully readable, guileless, environment-sensitive Winnicott over Lacan, the 'narcissist' who rejected the mothering function of the analyst and who may have abused patients (Finlay, 1989; Flax, 1990; Rudnytsky, 1991; Rustin, 1991).

Did no one recognize the importance of studying both Middle Group and Lacanian psychoanalysis? Even in the 1960s, there were a few such people. For example, Maud Mannoni, a member of Lacan's circle, traveled regularly to London for supervision with Winnicott (Boukobza, 1999). And in 1984, Anne Clancier and Jeanne Kalmonovitch published interviews with eight French analysts about the work of Winnicott, eliciting endorsements of many of his ideas (1987 [1984]).

Conversely, interest in Lacan on the part of anglophone analysts continues to grow, as Lacanian training institutes and study groups have arisen in the UK, Australia, and the US. Further evidence is found in volumes such as Lacan in America (Rabaté, 2000) and Jacques Lacan and the new second wave in American psychoanalysis (Gurewich et al., 1999). However, until very recently, the only psychoanalyst on either side of the Winnicott/Lacan divide consistently to build into his own theory elements of both traditions was André Green, who asserted:

After Freud, I see two authors who have pushed their research and coherence very far on the basis of two quite different points of view, and which up to a certain point converge. These two authors are Lacan and Winnicott.

Initially a member of Lacan's circle, Green chose to break ranks:

I had followed Lacan in the name of freedom of thought, and now he was upbraiding me for thinking for myself. It was the end of our collaboration….The more familiar I became with their [Middle Group] frame of mind, the more I had the feeling that this was where I could find what was missing in Lacan's approach, which seemed to me unsatisfactory, even misguided, in its abstraction. (Green, 1986, p. 9)

For Green, constructs such as the pre-oedipal period, the borderline diagnosis, and the use of countertransference—all anathema in Lacan's school—became sine qua non. Green qualified his enthusiasm by adding: 'I am not an unconditional Winnicottian…[A]n analyst who really wants to think about practice cannot dispense with a reflection on language, a reflection that is absent in Winnicott.'
It should be noted that some would object to Green's use of the term 'Winnicottian.' As one admirer put it: 'There can hardly be a school of open-mindedness.'

Similarly, Lacan insisted he himself was not a Lacanian but a Freudian. I will continue to refer to 'Lacanians' and 'Winnicottians' mindful of the limitations of those labels.

Whether consciously following Green's lead or not, a number of analysts in the past decade working independently of one another, have continued building a conceptual bridge between Middle Group and Lacanian theory (Bernstein, 1999; Eigen, 1981; Ireland, 2003; Kirshner, 2004; Lonie, 1990; Luepnitz, 2002; Mathelin, 1999; Rogers, 2006). These practitioners have placed themselves in an intellectual position roughly comparable to that of London's original Middle Group. Engaged by both Lacan and Winnicott, and disinclined to discipleship, they work in the area between two schools of allegedly incompatible thought. It might be useful, in fact, to describe this area with Winnicott's term 'potential space' which, by definition, both separates and joins two people or entities. The goal of these bridge-building authors, I believe, is not a synthesis creating one master discourse. Rather, the aim is to bring two radically different psychoanalytic paradigms into provocative contact.

How exactly does one do this, and to what clinical effect? André Green seems to see Winnicott and Lacan as complementary and mutually limiting. The quotation above shows him turning to Winnicott and the Middle Group as a corrective to Lacanian abstraction, and turning back to Lacan as a corrective to the absence of rigorous reflection on language in Winnicott.

Similarly, Jeanne Wolf Bernstein (1999) uses Lacanian constructs to titrate what she views as the excessive concentration on countertransference in relational psychoanalysis. Bernstein believes that Winnicott and the Middle Group made a vital contribution in turning our attention to the analyst's interiority, but cautions that an overuse of it can simply be a cover for the 'analyst's narcissism.' She writes: 'Although the American relational school has contributed much to humanize the analytic encounter…an overly democratic use of "working in the countertransference" risks trapping the analyst in the glass cabinets of what Lacan calls the imaginary order' (p. 291). Bernstein devotes the remainder of her incisive article to an explication of Lacan's early emphasis on the role of the signifier as a way of limiting what he perceived to be an overemphasis by Winnicott and other British analysts on the role of phantasy and the imaginary.

I will examine two fundamental differences between the theories of Lacan and Winnicott, arguing that much is gained by keeping both in mind in clinical practice. The most elemental difference between Winnicott and Lacan might be described as the question of who shows up for analysis—the self or the subject? The second essential difference concerns the aims of treatment.

Self vs. subject

There is no concept of 'self' in Freud. Freud preferred 'die Seele' which translates 'soul' or 'mind.' Both Rank and Ferenczi had invoked the 'self,' but Winnicott, apparently confident in the transparency of the term, cites no previous usages, nor reflects on its etymology.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word 'self' probably derives from the stem se used to connote sameness or identity. (Latin ipse translates 'itself,' used for emphasis.) But self used as a noun to describe what is really and intrinsically a person does not appear until the Renaissance. By 1595, Spenser is referring to 'myself, my inward selfe…'. And one year later, Shakespeare's Polonius urges 'to thine own self be true.' This semi-autonomous, perfectible entity, born of secular humanism, was not welcomed by everyone. In 1680, Carnock wrote: 'Self is the great Anti-Christ and Anti-God of the world.'

Winnicott wrote of the self's emergence through contact with a good enough mother, and its subsequent 'development,' 'growth' and 'maturation.' Eigen (1981) wrote of helping patients 'to grow a self.' That trope is interesting in light of the use of 'self' as a transitive verb that occurred around 1900, meaning: 'To fertilize by means of pollen from the same plant.' One could thus 'self' a flower. And Middle Group analysts hope to foster the flowering of the self.

It is precisely this collection of gardening metaphors that Lacan rejected. In a harsh critique of developmental models in Anglo-American analysis, Lacan demanded:

Can you really, you analysts, in all honesty, bring me testimonies of these splendid typical developments of the ego of subjects? These are tall stories. We are told how this great tree, man, has such a sumptuous development…A human life is something entirely different. (Lacan, 1988, p. 155)
Lacan's subject is by definition not a natural but a political entity. The first OED definition of the word is 'One who is under the dominion of a monarch.' In the 18th century it became central to philosophical discourse, e.g., Kant's 'thinking subject,' and remained a key word for Hegel. Althusser (1971), who believed that Lacan's work had laid the groundwork for a meeting of psychoanalysis and Marxism, is well known for his aphorism: ' tre un sujet, c'est d'être un sujet.' (That is: to be a subject in the sense of having agency is to be a subject in the sense of being limited by the laws of a culture.)

If one desired to map the Winnicottian self, one might look no farther than his paper on the transitional object, where he draws a mother's breast pointed in the direction of an infant. In the space between them he places arrows indicating their creation together, first of 'illusion' and later of the 'transitional object' (Winnicott, 1953). His aphorism—There is no such thing as a baby—means that where there is self, there is always already mother.

In contrast to this three-point structure, the Lacanian subject is mapped as a quadrature. The Lacanian diagram known as 'Schema L' (Lacan, 1977a) includes the following four points: S, o, o'and O. The S at the top left of the rectangular schema does not stand for 'subject' as is often assumed. 'S' is a pun on the Freudian 'das Es'—the It, which Lacan glosses as our 'ineffable, stupid existence' (p. 193-4). The small 'o'stands for one's objects. The o'stands for the ego and the O for the big Other. Note that the ego is just one of the subject's objects, albeit a privileged one. The subject is defined by movement across these four points; it has no core or center. Subjectivity does include the feeling of immediacy and intimacy ('This is me') designated by o'. But it is marked equally by the opposite—a radical alterity labeled 'O' in the diagram. This big Other refers not to a person but to a place; it is the locus of extreme alterity some associate with God, fate or death itself. Lacan asks poignantly, 'Who then is this Other to whom I am more attached than to myself…?' (1977a, p. 172). It is this second degree of otherness that most clearly marks the difference between Lacanian and non-Lacanian theory. One could say that Lacan's work is the clinical elaboration of Rimbaud's well known 'Je est un autre' ['I' is an other] (Rimbaud, 1966).

The differences between self and subject generate and are reflected in many important differences between the two traditions. For Lacan, the analyst starts out in the position of 'O' not 'o'—the place of the Winnicottian analyst. For Lacan, an interpretation should be 'halfway between a quotation and an enigma'—not a 'good feed.' For Winnicott, the central drama will turn around the infant's loss or feared loss of the breast. For Lacan, while loss is obviously important, something even more profound is at stake—the lack built into subjectivity by the mere existence of the unconscious.

More difficult than describing the theoretical difference between self and subject is conveying to someone trained in Middle Group or American relational ideas how this difference affects practice. The most helpful heuristic I've found thus far is a remark made by novelist Salman Rushdie during a lecture in 2000. Rushdie mentioned in passing that the first line of his novel Midnight's Children originally ran as follows: 'What matters most in your life happens in your absence.' If that seems to be obvious, consider that it runs counter to everything Winnicott taught. For Winnicott, and for the countless analysts influenced by him, what matters—what forms us psychically—is how we were held, fed, loved, and above all recognized as infants. Those early gestures involving touch, listening and seeing call the inchoate self into being. It is a psychoanalysis of presence.

In contrast, Lacan insists that before we are touched and fed by mothers and others—before we speak—we have been spoken about. We are given a name already stuffed with hope, fear, expectation. Our birth was anxiously awaited or dreaded. We come into a world not of our making—into war or peacetime—into a caste or class that will inform everything we do and say. It is a psychoanalysis organized around the knowledge of limits and death, and always in the key of the signifier.
A clinical example will follow a brief discussion of the aims of treatment.

The aims of psychoanalys