Marilyn Charles: Featured Clinician and Scholar

Marilyn Charles was born on March 14, 1951, in Cleveland, Ohio, the second of three daughters. Her parents were chemical engineer Jason Carl Bleiweiss and psychologist Laura Katz Bleiweiss. The family moved to Midland, Michigan shortly after Marilyn’s fifth birthday, where they resided throughout her elementary school years. After that, the family moved to New York City for one year as her father prepared for a position in Tarragona, Spain, where the family lived for two years. During this time Marilyn attended boarding school in French-speaking Switzerland, first in the mountains and then near Geneva. At that point, she moved with her sisters and mother to Wassenaar, the Netherlands, and attended the International School of the Hague while her father completed the final year of his project in Tarragona. They then returned to the States for her final two years of high school. After

Page 301

graduation, she went to Iowa State University to study clothing design but felt constricted by that program and changed her major to philosophy. She spent several years moving back and forth between academic and fine arts programs in various locations before relocating to the southwest, where she raised her children and graduated from the University of New Mexico in 1987. She took her doctoral degree in 1995 in clinical psychology at Michigan State University, was certified in 1999 in psychoanalysis by the Michigan Psychoanalytic Council, and in 2007 was Board Certified in Psychoanalysis by the American Board of Professional Psychology.

Currently, Marilyn is a Senior Staff Psychologist at the Austen Riggs Center and a psychoanalyst in private practice in Stockbridge, MA. She is co-founder of the Austen Riggs Psychosis Research Study, where she looks intensively at the narratives, histories, and treatment experiences of individuals who have been labeled psychotic. She is also affiliated with Harvard University, the University of Monterrey, the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, and the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Charles is a Contributing Editor of Psychoanalysis, Culture, & Society and serves on the editorial boards of a number of psychoanalytic journals. As Co-Chair of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS) and past President of Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) of the American Psychological Association, she is actively engaged in mentoring and promoting community involvement for those in the helping professions and supports psychoanalytic training as well as outreach and research initiatives. Marilyn has a particular interest in mentoring and was awarded the 2012 Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Development of Early Career Clinicians by the Division 39 Early Career Committee and the 2013 Leadership Award by Division 39.

Marilyn has presented her work nationally and internationally, publishing over 100 articles and book chapters as well as five books: Patterns: Building Blocks of Experience (2002), Constructing Realities: Transformations Through Myth and Metaphor (2004), Learning from Experience: A Guidebook for Clinicians (2004), Working with Trauma: Lessons from Bion and Lacan (2012), Psychoanalysis and Literature: The Stories We Live (2015). She also edited two volumes: Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering (with Michael O’Loughlin; 2015) and Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining

Page 302

Terms and Building Bridges (2017). Two further edited volumes, Women and Psychosis (with Marie Brown) and The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education: Building Lives (with Jill Bellinson) are currently in the works.          

An artist and poet, Marilyn has been interested in ways in which creative potential can be sidelined or facilitated. This interest has informed her research, which focuses on creativity, psychosis, and resilience.  In her writing, Marilyn works to shift the discourse that has been couched in terms of mental illness and disease toward one more fully anchored in the realities of human suffering that make it difficult for individuals to build the reflective functions and secure identities so integral to resilience in the face of life’s inevitable challenges. From that perspective, she has documented the traumatic underpinnings of psychosis and works to illuminate the impact of the intergenerational transmission of trauma and marginalization so as to inform greater insight, more effective preventative measures, and more humane treatment options for those who suffer in our midst.

Marilyn Charles (MC) was interviewed online by editor Paul H. Elovitz (PHE) in August 2017. 

PHE: What brought you to psychoanalysis and subsequently applied psychoanalysis (psychohistory)?

MC: In my graduate program, the best supervisors were psychoanalysts. They invited me to think more deeply about my own and others’ experiences and provided a language and a conceptual framework for making sense of the multiple layers of experience threading through my own and others’ stories. It was a small step from there to becoming engaged in my own analysis. I think that immersion in the psychoanalytic journey changes the way you engage with self, others, and meaning.

Such engagement invites one to think about the contexts in which meanings arise. Familial and intergenerational threads have clearly informed my being, and so my interest in history and culture is hard to separate from my interest in psychoanalysis. Certainly, my engagement with the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society has added depth and richness to those explorations, as has my work at the Austen Riggs Center, work with individuals, and in my attempts to have an impact on organizations and societal structures where we take as extensive a family history as possible to enable us to see the threads of meaning and trauma

Page 303

trails, informing the experience of family members across generations.

PHE: What is your psychoanalytic/psychotherapeutic experience and what is its influence on you as a psychohistorian? How has it changed your vision of the world?

MC: The most important lessons I learned from my own analysis were that there were layers and layers awaiting exploration and that only I truly had the key. That experience has helped me to find my bearings with my own patients, to recognize that my job is to provide a space in which they can make their own journey, rather than colluding in desperate attempts to find outside of oneself what can only be found within. My patients and supervisees confirm this insight and continue to increase my sense of humility in relation to the very real limits of what I can and can’t do, which, I think, in turn makes me more useful to them in supporting their efforts to find their own way(s).

PHE: Of which of your works are you most proud?

MC: That is a difficult question for me because it seems as though my most important work has been the most humbling. Increasingly, I find myself humbled in the face of the limits I come to in my ability to help ease the suffering of others.

If you ask about what work I am most pleased with, on the other hand, my work on the intersections between psychoanalysis, literature, and art has given me a great deal of pleasure, particularly my discussions of mourning in relation to my own collages and my recent work on traumatic trials in literature and culture. My work with my patients and with younger generations of professionals also gives me a great deal of pleasure. Being able to support others’ journeys is a profound gift.

PHE: What are you working on now? What is its importance and when do you expect to have it published?

MC: Along with my continued work with Michael O’Loughlin looking at the experiences of individuals who have struggled with psychosis, I am currently working on two edited volumes, with a third in the hopper. One is an edited volume with Marie (Hansen) Brown as first editor titled, “Women and Psychosis.” It is, I think, an important volume in that we invited people to speak from various perspectives about their knowledge of psychosis, whether from lived experience, clinical work, or research.

Page 304

I am also working on an edited volume with Jill Bellinson titled, “The Importance of Play in Early Childhood Education: Building Lives,” which came from my work with Gunawirra in New South Wales, Australia. Gunawirra works with the families and teachers of preschool age Aboriginal children. I found that the teachers were hungry for the type of knowledge that one can find in the developmental, attachment, psychoanalytic, and play therapy literature. We asked individuals who had contributed to those literatures to write chapters directly to and for the early childhood classroom teacher who is working in areas of severe strain and hardship.

I am also collaborating on a third volume with Bindu Methikalam on how to best include issues regarding diversity into graduate clinical psychology training. In the future, I would like to do a book for the general public that focuses on the importance of developing reflection function in our children. Insufficient attention to developing the capacity to think is a core problem that runs through mental health services, education, parenting, and also establishing and sustaining a coherent democracy.

PHE: What is your primary professional affiliation?

MC: The Austen Riggs Center.

PHE: How extensive is Austen Riggs’ commitment to applied psychoanalysis (psychohistory)?

MC: Riggs has a strong commitment to applied psychoanalysis. Through the Erikson Institute, the education and training arm of the Center, research and scholarly work are actively supported. In our clinical work we also take a strong stand regarding the importance and impact of history upon the individual life, taking as extensive a family history as can be obtained along with the life history. We look for themes, patterns, and trauma trails that might help us to better understand where an individual has become stuck and how their symptoms might be speaking about difficulties within the family system that cannot be spoken about in other forms. This model invites respect for all family members so that good intentions can be recognized and worked with in ways that help to build more supportive, respectful family engagement and support growth and development in all family members.

PHE: What special training was most helpful in doing your psychohistorical work?

Page 305

MC: I have always been drawn to biographies as a way of making sense of self and experience, to hear the “understories” of others that were missing from the discourse of my family of origin. A general early interest in how families coped with difficult circumstances focused on the Holocaust by middle school and increasingly became an interest in how intergenerational trauma and marginalization haunt us until we can pick up the threads and examine as well as make sense of them. My attempts to better understand and work through issues that have arisen in relation to the capacity to speak in my own voice have informed much of my work, in terms of the ways in which people can become waylaid in their development and be inhibited from speaking on their own behalf or even knowing their own minds. I have explored these issues not only through my own lenses as a woman and as a receptor of the echoes of my personal history, but also increasingly as a citizen of the world, caring deeply about the plights of those whose development is impeded by trauma, marginalization, poverty, war, and oppression of all kinds.

Increasing age seems to attenuate some of the particularities of experience such that the ways in which one is inevitably implicated in the wellbeing of others becomes highlighted. I hope that writing and speaking from this perspective will support others who raise their voices in the service of the collective good. Seeing what we have in common is particularly important in these divisive times.

PHE: Have you published, or do you plan to publish, an autobiography or any autobiographical writings?

MC: I do think about writing through my history, whether as nonfiction or fiction I am not sure. Writing has always been my way of figuring things out and autobiographical material has seeped into some of my work, as is likely true of many people in my field. I do believe that we best come to understand others through a deeper and broader understanding of ourselves, and a willingness to be interested in and curious about differences between ourselves and others. As Freud taught us, the process of deep internal exploration is a method worth passing along.

More specifically, I have hoped to write a book with my children about our experiences of loss within our family. My daughter, Dr. Devon King, and I dipped briefly into this material in a previous issue of Clio’s Psyche, but she is currently at a period in

Page 306

life when motherhood and career demands are rightly center stage, and my son, Jonathan Charles, is busy building his own life.

PHE: What brought you to your work on psychosis?

MC: I have long been interested in the at-times fine line between creativity and madness, and also ways in which women have been driven mad by a society that speaks for and about them rather than to them. How one manages to keep one’s bearings, one’s individuality, and one’s creative potential in a world that pushes toward prevailing notions of normalcy and conformity has driven many of my efforts. Through my research and clinical work, I have been deeply touched by the suffering of those deemed psychotic and the ways in which the traumatic underpinnings of their suffering can go unnoticed or unacknowledged. This lack of recognition can exacerbate the problems, literally driving people mad. I have tried to work from a more humanistic perspective rather than accepting ideas about psychosis that seem to further marginalize those already suffering. Notably, if we look internationally, we see that the most effective programs have been those that recognize that trauma and marginalization are the core functional elements driving psychosis, and they work toward building community for those who have been driven outside of their own.

PHE: As an important leader of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS), what is your vision for this group?

MC: For me, one of the great strengths of APCS is that it is an inclusive community in which each member is invited to speak on equal terms with any other. Rather than focusing on titles and hierarchies, it is a place where ideas can be engaged with, allowing young people to find their way into the discourse and add their voices. In this way, people of different stages of professional development, from different countries, backgrounds, orientations, and disciplines can learn from one another in respectful engagements.

I believe that the psychoanalytic lens is a fundamentally important tool for looking at and attempting to resolve the issues facing us in current times. I am grateful to APCS for providing a venue for working together with this powerful tool. I am also grateful to have such a venue to which I can invite young people to dare to speak openly and candidly about their work, passions, ideas, and selves, with trust that they will be heard and engaged with respectfully.

Page 307

PHE: I have felt very comfortable when organizing panels for and presenting at the APCS, but I wonder if others at this association see themselves as doing psychohistory. What are your thoughts on this?

MC: Likely some do and some don’t. The term “psychohistory” is a particular language structure that comes from a particular tradition. I would imagine that most of us in APCS are doing psychohistory in some form, without necessarily using that language.

PHE: As someone who had significant writer’s block for over the first half of my life, tell me about your work with artists, musicians, and writers who are experiencing creative blocks.

MC: I find that such blocks tend to have to do with a misplacement of value. When one becomes focused on the product rather than the process, it can be very difficult to create anything. The idea of the thing that one should be doing or the product that might have value becomes a persecutor, I think, precisely because it is defined as the thing that one does not know how to do.

I try to help people regain their bearings from the inside out, and to try to let their curiosity, interests, and passions drive them in a process of engagement with whatever medium they are working in. In working with one’s tools, one can always learn something, and if one stays close to the material, something emerges. I believe that each person’s vision is unique and special, and that to the extent that we can bring our own vision to bear on a problem, the result will be unique and interesting because, as Brenda Milner said, it bears the mark of the person making it. This is where I appreciate Lacan’s later work on the sinthome and the Borromean knot, the interlocking rings of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic, as well as essence, person, and culture, as they become uniquely entangled together in the course of a human life. Respect for that complexity leads us inevitably into psychohistory, does it not?

PHE: Creative people have sometimes expressed a fear of psychoanalysis on the grounds that it would inhibit creative expression. Have you sometimes found this to be the case? If not, have creative people sometimes experienced other fears about psychoanalysis that have come true, or other negatives?

MC: At its best, psychoanalysis invites us to dive deep and discover ourselves. To the extent that we are invited to constrain, inhibit, or “normalize” ourselves, that, to my mind, is not psychoanal-

Page 308

ysis. Any fears can come true if we feed them sufficiently. Look around us!

PHE: What training should a person entering psychohistory today pursue?

MC: I would encourage each person to learn about themselves. Psychoanalysis is a great training ground, whatever one’s chosen profession.

PHE: How do you see psychohistory developing in the next decade?

MC: I would hope that we would continue to develop ideas about the structure and processes through which human beings are formed, rather than resorting to the types of personalized accounts that can be more titillating than useful. Trying to stay on the side of developing meaning rather than discharging affect is likely a challenge in any profession. In this country, we desperately need to recognize that at the core of many of our societal problems is a failure to recognize the importance of learning to learn rather than managing information, and we need to work at integrating learning into our educational systems

PHE: What do we, as psychohistorians, need to do in order to strengthen our work?

MC: Likely establish and strengthen dialogues with other disciplines that have mutual or complementary goals and aims. Interdisciplinary forums, such as that found in APCS, are particularly useful for such efforts.

PHE: What is the importance of childhood to psychohistory?

MC: All meanings are fundamentally grounded in our experiences of being in the world. Meanings are inevitably grounded in both the life history and the transgenerational pre-histories that contextualize that life story. From my perspective, no psychohistorical understanding can be complete without some reference to childhood and the ways in which meanings have been construed and constructed at the individual, familial, and cultural levels.

PHE: Some Forum researchers have been struggling with the issue of identification with a particular parent and achievement. If you would like to comment on this, it would be helpful to them.

MC: Identity develops in the context of relationships. We learn who we are in relation to others who are both similar and different.

Page 309

The ways in which others impinge on and also differentiate themselves from us have an impact. To some extent, these impingements are inevitable and may be subtle and inseparable from our selves and beings. Defining oneself as a separate and unique human being happens throughout life, with a few pivotally important moments, the first being what Winnicott refers to as “the use of the object.” At which time the child, in being able to say “no” to the other’s desire, is able to assert his or her own desire. When the caregiver can tolerate this assertion of autonomy, the child learns that he can be separate without being destroyed or left utterly alone. That makes a relationship between two separate beings possible. Another defining moment (figuratively speaking; it happens over extended time!) occurs in adolescence and early adulthood, as the person begins more consciously and explicitly to define him- or herself as an autonomous human being with his or her own values, goals, and desires. This, of course, is never entirely possible; we are inevitably entangled in the world views, desires, and values of familial and cultural influences, but we can recognize these entanglements sufficiently to be able to make choices rather than feeling utterly constrained by them.

When identifications are problematic in terms of one’s ability to define oneself as a separate subject, then the process of defining and differentiating must be more explicitly done. Finding one’s own distinctive value in relation to an idealized parent—or in relation to a demonized one—poses particular problems. Insight-oriented psychotherapy can be useful in sorting through such identifications and dis-identifications toward more fully recognizing one’s own values and desires.

PHE: In your experience and life, are high achievers more identified with their fathers?

MC: I have not studied this subject but my guess would be that the subject is more complex, that many high achievers are working against an identification with the father rather than in relation to an identification with the father, whereas some may be driven by the absence of the father.

PHE: Following up on an issue raised by Freud, what is the impact of parental loss on your level of achievement and those of subjects you have studied?

MC: Parental loss is directly implicated through my father’s loss of his own father when he was 11 months old. Having not had

Page 310

a father, he was able to commit to conscious values in relation to being a good father but did not have the internal, unconscious modeling of warmth, love, attention, and forgiveness that one might take in from a good-enough father. Less directly, I can see in my own history the type of disorganized attachment described in the literature, when parents are seemingly available but inhibited from being emotionally available by the failed mourning that has occurred across the generations. My mother’s mother, for example, grew up in the shadow of the mother who was ill and dying throughout her childhood, a shadow that then was amplified by losses that occurred during the Holocaust. My mother’s father was rejected by his family for not following their narrow ideas of religious faith. Discovering the failed mourning that was not recognized and could not be therefore spoken about or worked through has been at the core of my personal journey, and also my intellectual and professional journey on behalf of my patients, whose suffering often has those same invisible sources. Affecting me more directly as an adult, however, have been losses in relation to my children, from which I have both suffered and learned.

PHE: How do you explain the growth and psychology of fundamentalism?

MC: Fear, suffering, and a sense of deprivation all invite a move toward fundamentalism. I think that there are many forces in today’s world that exploit fear, suffering, and deprivation, offering fundamentalism as mechanisms for social control that further splits between self and the other, thereby leaving the instability in place or even exacerbating it. Sylvan Tomkins linked fundamentalism to an authoritarian style of parenting that does not leave sufficient room for the child to develop his own values and beliefs. I think that a permissive style, similarly, leaves the child without the wherewithal to develop a secure identity so as to be able to make his or her own decisions reflectively rather than reflexively.

PHE: What are your thoughts on the psychology and psychodynamics of violence in our world?

MC: That is a complex subject, worth trying to understand better from these perspectives, but I think it would be disrespectful to the complexity and importance of the topic to try to address it in the few words I might choose here. Certainly, an understanding of Kleinian conceptualizations such as splitting and projective identification would be important lenses, as would the lens of the impact

Page 311

of fear and suffering on the human psyche, as mentioned previously.

PHE: How do you understand the psychology of terrorism?

MC: This seems to me at its foundation to lead to the same issues as the previous question. I think that psychology has done a great deal to inform an understanding of ways in which people are impacted by fear and persuasion. That expertise has become a source of propaganda and even mind control, used both in terrorist tactics and in advertising/media/political merchandising of peoples’ minds.

PHE: How can psychologically-oriented scholars have more impact in academia and on society in general?

MC: I think that we need to speak up and write in language and in venues that are more generally accessible. Psychoanalytic scholars, in particular, have a great deal to offer but often speak in language too obscure to be generally accessible, and we tend to speak to one another rather than thinking about how to bring our insights to bear on the problems facing individuals and systems within the social structures. If we want to solve large problems, we have to be able to engage in respectful dialogue with people who do not see things quite the same way as we do.

PHE: What is the impact of psychohistory on your area of expertise?

MC: It is impossible to truly understand human suffering without a recognition of the types of contextual factors highlighted by psychohistory. Without such recognition, we are pushed toward the types of pseudo solutions that attempt to ameliorate symptoms without addressing the source of the trouble(s). In my work, I see that the result of such failed ameliorative attempts is often to prolong and even amplify suffering, as people are further burdened by the failures and also by the cumulative effects of offerings that often have side effects or even iatrogenic impact, not to mention the burden of increased hopelessness and helplessness.

PHE: How can we recruit new people to the field?

MC: It is important to be active in speaking about the importance of context in relation to human suffering so that those who are drawn to fields that attempt to ameliorate such suffering are offered a broader view than that afforded by the medical model. In-

Page 312

terdisciplinary conversations, conferences, and journals are important opportunities to inform others and to expand the thinking of those involved in direct care and also those involved in trying to understand, speak about, and address social problems, whether from the academic or social science/research perspectives.

PHE: What books were important to your development and why?

MC: Literature has formed the foundation of my interest in and thinking about the complexities of human experience. Explicitly psychological and psychoanalytic works include Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), which invited me into an experience-near sense of the “other worlds” of traumatic experience, including the price of inhabiting those worlds and the possibility of moving back toward the consensual world. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), afforded me ways of thinking about methods to explore the universe of dreams and understand primary process as an alternative way of making sense of experience, a commentary on and speaking-back to more conscious, rational thought. Ignacio Matte Blanco, The Unconscious as Infinite Sets (1998), expanded my thinking about these two “logics,” each of which is necessary to and informs the other. (These three works were integral to my thinking about creativity and the complex relationships between idiosyncrasy and well-being).

Wilfred Bion, Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psycho-analysis (1967), invited an inquiry into the possibility of making sense of meanings that could not be articulated by the individual. His other work, Seven Servants: Four Works (1977), stressed for me the importance of being respectful of my own (and others’!) experience as the ultimate reference point, and also recognition of the inevitable tensions between the establishment and the new idea. Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation (2011), gave me a way of conceptualizing the primary experiential building blocks and stumbling blocks that come forward and disregulate us during moments of strain, and ways of conceptualizing some of the more primary defenses we encounter in ourselves and in our work with patients. Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971), highlights the fundamental importance of developmental milestones in the possibility of more fully becoming oneself, articulated in clearer form than anywhere else I have found.

Page 313

Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudiliere, History Beyond Trauma (2004), is perhaps the most beautiful and best articulated plea for a recognition of history as the essential lens through which to understand any person’s plight or journey. Marion Milner and Nina Coltart gave me strong female models to identify with and emulate. I have also found Lacan’s ideas indispensable, perhaps most particularly The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973), which offers important metaphors that are useful in recognizing some of the pitfalls at play in human relationships and the ways in which we hide not only from one another but also, more importantly, from ourselves.

PHE: Who was important to your development as a student of psychosocial phenomena? Did Erik Erikson have an impact on you?

MC: Erik Erikson’s ideas are integral to any sense of human development. But, for me, Winnicott’s ideas have been more important, particularly his conceptualization of the use of an object, which seems to be such an essential stumbling block in so many people’s developmental journeys.

PHE: Are there any mentors who come to mind?

MC: Perhaps my most significant mentor was Jim Grotstein, who early on encouraged me to believe in myself. Most important, however, has been my husband, who has given me a home in a universe that often felt alien and unwieldy, thereby enabling me to discover myself sufficiently to find my own home(s) and community(s).

PHE: How do you define psychohistory?

MC: I think of psychohistory as the exploration of human meaning(s) through the exploration of persons and peoples over time.

PHE: Please tell me the people who have made the greatest contributions to your understanding of psychohistory.

MC: I am primarily a psychoanalyst who recognizes the importance of psychohistory, as I define it, but who has worked largely outside of the field of psychohistory proper. My influences are informed by what I have found useful and omit important names from within the field. The authors who have contributed the most to my understanding include Erik Erikson and others I will

Page 314

say a few words about. Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière’s History Beyond Trauma (2004) is an important influence. Their contention is that it is history that underlies severe psychological distress and that only through a greater appreciation of our histories—and the impact of social catastrophe on the psyche—can we work through what otherwise presents itself as madness.  Also, the first volume of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis (1994). They too recognize that trauma can be passed through the generations as family secrets, “transgenerational phantoms” that haunt us until we can unearth and explore them, as well as learn to recognize the concealed meanings.

PHE: Thank you for sharing aspects of your life experience and thoughts with us.

Page 315