Three Impossible Professions in One

Review of Douglas Kirsner’s (Ed.) Psychoanalytic Organizations: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (New York: International Psychoanalytic Books, 2022), ISBN 978-1-956864-21-2, pp. i-x, 672, softbound, $35.00.

Sigmund Freud, in his paper “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937), spoke of the three impossible professions: education, government, and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic organizations combine all three. Psychoanalytic Organizations: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (2022) is a treasure chest of chapters addressing various aspects of psychoanalytic organizational life. Doug Kirsner edited the collection and invited a number of world-class psychoanalysts to address this topic. Weighing in at over 600 pages, there is a lot to consider.

The lead chapter by Fred Busch is “The Troubling Problem of Knowledge in Psychoanalytic Institutes.” Busch says seminars tend not to be valued as much as personal analysis and supervision. He calls for more attention to be placed on the teaching of theory and technique, as well as noting a shift in student attitudes from the past when students were more interested in learning from their teachers. These days, students want to lead their own analytic studies before learning the basics. Busch sees this as a postmodern, anti-intellectual trend that dismisses authority as authoritarian and overvalues the subjective and the authentic to the point of abandoning hard-won knowledge.

But authority is not the same as authoritarian. My view is that while both are positioned hierarchically above, the authority, on the one hand, teaches, guides, protects, nurtures, and cares for those hierarchically below so that they can rise up and become authorities themselves. The authoritarian, on the other hand, uses those below him to satisfy his own needs: He oppresses them and holds on to power until it is ripped away. Furthermore, the subjective is wonderful if it can be related to others and the world. But, if it cannot, then it becomes an anti-intellectual shortcut to pseudo-knowledge and the authentic. The authentic also has its place in this world, particularly in humanistic and existential psychology, but the underbelly of it is countertransference.

Busch makes many statements that emphasize his main point: “For many, authenticity replaced technique based upon a theory of the mind as the primary therapeutic agent” (p. 15). “Expertise has become confused with authoritarianism” (p. 16). “In a very short period of time we seemed to have moved from a rebellion against the authoritarian that ruled psychoanalysis, to an authoritarian anti-authority stance” (p. 16). He also says, “Subjectivity, relativism, perspectivism… are the new coins of legitimacy” (p. 19). Busch believes psychoanalysis does have hard-won

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knowledge that is worth teaching to analysts in training. I agree with him, but then there are discussions by Douglas A. Chavis, Jane Hall, Henry Friedman, Cecilio Paniagua, Henry Zvi Lothane, and Shmuel Erlich, and the sparks fly! Many of the critiques focus on the rights of analysts in training and concerns about the call for authority sliding into restriction, rigidification, authoritarianism, and conservativism.

The rest of this book’s chapters address a wide range of topics. R. D. Hinshelwood’s “Unresolvable Controversies? Investigating the Unconscious in Groups” is a fantastic discussion of historic controversies in psychoanalysis by an analyst highly knowledgeable of group phenomena. Joseph Aguayo writes about “Psychoanalytic Institutional Life and Its Discontents. Then and Now. A Bionian Analysis.” It is a continuation of the exploration of psychoanalytic history in relation to the Bionian theory of group phenomena. Arnold Richards’s “Personal and Political History of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute” addresses the intersection of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic training, and the power dynamics at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (NYPSI). Merle Molofsky discusses Richards’s paper as a member of the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis, which was specifically formed by Theodore Reik as an alternative to the NYPSI.

Jill Savage Scharff and David E. Scharff’s chapter is titled, “The Nature, Structure, and Experience of an Experimental Distance Learning Psychoanalytic Center for Training,” referring to the International Institute of Psychoanalytic Training. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the distance training of psychoanalysts, the Scharffs are a dynamic duo who bring thoughtful, creative, and clinically significant contributions to our field. Their institute is a response to prevailing psychoanalytic training and a point of orientation for newer groups. Anita Bryce’s “A History of the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis” is another valuable contribution to local psychoanalytic history. Founded in 1914, it went through schisms, reunifications, and reorganizations to become what is today a robust program with a prospering clinic.

Kerry Kelly Novick’s “An Essay on Psychoanalytic Training and Identity” makes interesting reading, as it describes her own trajectory from her study with Anna Freud at the Hampstead Clinic to her later work in cofounding the New Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Training Program with Jack Novick, Denia Barrett, and

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Tom Barrett. Three other chapters by Mark Leffert, Barnaby Barratt, and Warren Procci, offer further discussion about psychoanalysis today in the context of its history and politics. Trevor Peterson’s chapter, “Narcissism, Echoism, Perfection, and Death towards a Structural Psychoanalysis,” is highly theoretical and quite dense. But the discussants, John Auerbach and Ronnie Carmeli, seem to understand Patterson’s ideas better than I do and offer thoughtful discussions.

Doug Kirsner’s chapter, “Freud and Anti-Semitism,” addresses the highlights of Freud’s relationship to his Jewish identity and struggle with Austrian anti-Semitism. Michael Poff’s chapter on “The Fallacy of Pathological Patriarchy as the Cause of the Oedipus Complex” is a tour de force written by a psychoanalyst-anthropologist addressing Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex both clinically and in the context of Totem and Taboo (1913). Rebecca Coleman Curtis presents a chapter, “Psychoanalysis: Science or Art? Science and Art,” to which Michael Poff responds in a thoughtful discussion. Nathan Szajnberg and Wikun Wu contribute “As-if Countertransference: A Chinese Experience,” to which Francis Baudry and Jing Chen reply. Susan Kavaler-Adler’s chapter is “Loray Daws, Review of the Klein-Winnicott Dialectic: Transformative New Metapsychology and Interactive Clinical Theory,” to which Loray Daws offers his comments.

This rich feast ends with three articles by psychoanalyst David Jachim: “The Death Drive is Alive and Well,” discussed by Jeffrey Eaton; “The Learned Analyst,” conferred by Judith Eekhoff; and Jachim’s third chapter, “To Three or Not to Three,” discoursed by Gunther Perdigao. Jachim’s chapters are concise but highly evocative, as are the discussions.

In short, Psychoanalytic Organizations: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is a cornucopia of thought-provoking chapters addressing a wide range of topics and well worth reading.

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