The Unorthodox, Interesting, and Productive Life of Arnold Richards

Review of Arnold D. Richards’ Unorthodox: My Life In and Outside of Psychoanalysis: A Memoir (New York: International Psychoanalytic Books, 2023), ISBN 9781956864502, 346 pages, paperback, $35.

The word Unorthodox in this book’s title is clearly appropriate for Arnold Richards’ life and autobiography. When this most accomplished psychoanalytic editor and publisher came to my attention, I was immediately impressed and set up the December 2013 interview “Arnold Richards: Disseminating Psychoanalysis” in Clio’s Psyche with him. I developed enormous respect and admiration for Dr. Richards and his talented wife, Arlene Kramer Richards. His energy is all but astounding, and I hope that at his age, I can come close to matching it and his productivity. Among his many achievements, he fought effectively for the inclusion of

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non-psychiatrists into psychoanalysis, healed many as an analyst, did yeoman service as an editor, and created International Psychoanalytic Books (IPBooks), which has brought some wonderful titles to the psychoanalytic community while providing creative employment for his daughter and son-in-law.

Unorthodox starts with a fine introduction by Daniel Benveniste and the reflections of Nancy Goodman. Benveniste gets to the heart of the matter when he writes that “Psychoanalysis is inherently subversive, and Arnold Richards is a psychoanalytic guerrilla warrior.” Amidst Daniel’s other insights are over three pages of short biographies in “Richards’ Personal Thought Collective” (pp. xxx-xxxii). These are very helpful for the reader, especially since the author’s thesis is “that personal relationships determine politics and are affected by politics” (p. 123). Without this, the reader might get lost among the New York psychoanalysts he references. Additionally, Richards has made a great commitment to bring psychotherapeutic training and insights to China, provided crisis counseling to New York survivors of 9/11, brought psychotherapy to prisoners in Virginia, and generally worked to expand the application of psychoanalysis. All of these important contributions are covered in his book.

Richards’ memoir covers his family history, childhood and youth in Brooklyn, stellar education at all levels, sparkling career, and turning against the politics of exclusion in the psychoanalytic community. His father was a Bolshevik atheist, and his mother an orthodox Jew. His life mirrors the extremes of his parents. Much of Richards’ unorthodoxy may come from his father, who went to the movies on Yom Kippur. Still, unlike this sad man who lost a brother and his mother in the Russian Civil War and saw the failure of his dream of a wonderful communist society, Arnie’s life has been better, and his zest for life is enormous. Although Arnold had a bar mitzvah, he wandered from his religion and later became passionate about being Jewish, identifying strongly with Yiddish culture and language. A daughter points out that when she was young, her father was always curiously asking where his fellow Jews or their families were from.

Richards had a solid psychiatric and psychoanalytic education, and he advanced rapidly in the orthodox Freudian New York psychoanalytic community after spending time at the Menninger Clinic in Kansas. Arnie fell in love with editing. First, he had turned the dull Bulletin of the American Psychoanalytic Associa-

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tion into the lively The American Psychoanalyst (TAP), and then, for a decade, greatly improved JAPA as its editor. “For those ten years, JAPA was my life,” he says (p. 177).

As noted by Benveniste, Richards has been a maker of “good trouble” for necessary change, to use the term of the late Congressman John Lewis. His most important “good trouble” started with wanting his psychologist wife, Arlene, to be accepted by the New York Psychoanalytic Society (NYPSI). This led him to focus on the psychoanalytic politics of exclusion from the NYPSI. Aside from the unfairness of this policy to non-psychiatrists like his wife, he pointed out that psychiatrists were no longer opting for psychoanalytic training because, as prescribers of drugs, they can make $1,000 an hour rather than being paid for one analytic session. To Richards, they are becoming drug dealers. Without opening up the field to lay analysts, as Freud had wanted, the practice of psychoanalysis might have died.

One of many unorthodox aspects of this memoir is that his children write about the lives of their parents, and his wife suddenly interjects as well with her own recollection. There is no index, but his book is adorned with documents, photos, and poems. I especially enjoyed his “Father’s Day” poem about his father’s sad life. There are various interesting tidbits, such as Marianne Kris being the analyst to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Marilyn Monroe.

Arnold Richards places great hope on the growth of psychoanalysis in China as it declines as a treatment option in the U.S. I recommend reading this interesting, informative, and insightful memoir about a major figure in psychoanalysis and an important analytic editor.

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