Historian and Psychoanalyst: D. J. Fisher

David James Fisher was born on November 24, 1946 in Brooklyn to Martin Milton Fisher, an internist with a practice in New York City, and Bess Kaufman Fisher, a housewife and mother. He is the oldest of three sons in a non-observant Jewish liberal professional middle class family. When he was seven, the family moved to the suburbs and he graduated from New Rochelle High School in 1964. He graduated as a history major from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968. At New York University he earned an MA in education (1968) and in history (1969), where he worked with Frank Manuel and Leo Gershoy. For his doctoral degree, in 1973 he went to the University of Wisconsin where George Mosse was his major professor. Important influences were the European cultural and intellectual historian Mosse, historian of socialism and social movements Harvey Goldberg, and Professor of French Literature and Camus scholar Germaine Bree. At the Sixieme Section of the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes, he attended the postdoctoral seminar of Georges Haupt, an historian’s historian and specialist on the history of socialism and communism.

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As a historian he has published three books: Bettelheim: Living and Dying (2008), Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (1988, 2004), and Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition (1991, 2009). In the introductions to these valuable contributions to scholarship, he has shown a remarkable openness to writing about his own feelings, thoughts, and emotional and intellectual growth as a consequence of his life experience and psychoanalysis. In addition to these books, Dr. Fisher has authored over 50 journal articles and book chapters in contemporary French cultural history and the history of psychoanalysis, including essays on Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Sartre, Fenichel, Spielrein, and Stoller. He has published essays on the history of the European free clinics, the politics and ideologies of analytics institutes, and the technical and theoretical issues involved in working with erotic countertransference. A recent essay on Peter Loewenberg deals with the history of the Lake Arrowhead University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium and the critical importance of the clinical training of Research Psychoanalysts.

Fisher has worked as an Associate Editor of North America for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (IJP), on the advisory board of its Society, and as the editor of The Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin. He has lectured extensively, speaking in France, Canada, and Great Britain, as well as at a number of prominent universities, including the California Institute of Technology, M.I.T., Brandeis, and Emory University. In addition, he has lectured at the Shanghai Mental Health Center and the Fudan University in Shanghai, China. Dr. Fisher is the father of two children and practices psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Los Angeles.

Paul Elovitz (PHE): What brought you to psychological history?

David James Fisher (DJF): I became interested in psychohistory in graduate school after having developed a deep intellectual interest in Freud and the seminal impact of psychoanalytic theories on the cultural history of the 20^th century. George Mosse always taught texts by Freud in his Western Civilization survey and upper level courses in Modern European cultural history. He also introduced us to Jung’s thoughts and complicity with aspects of National Socialist ideology.

During the years 1968-69 while at New York University, I

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had the privilege of studying European intellectual history with Frank Manuel. That was the year he published his psychoanalytic biography of Newton, which was incredibly stimulating to me. His approach to the history of ideas almost always included a subtle analytic understanding of the various thinkers on his syllabus, including utopian thinkers. At the University of Wisconsin from 1969-73, we graduate students had an interest in psychohistorical perspectives and, above all, the writings of Erik Erikson. We were also interested in many of Peter Loewenberg’s articles published in the American Historical Review. I never entirely embraced the methodology of psychohistory, but it was important in my itinerary of moving from European cultural history to the practice of psychoanalysis. I would call myself a fellow traveler of psychohistory. If labels must be used, I am a cultural historian with a psychoanalytic perspective and an analyst who thinks historically. I define myself as a psychoanalyst. I have been practicing for over 35 years and it was a critical aspect of my professional identity. I still remain fascinated by applied psychoanalysis and have written pieces on the psychology of literary texts, films, and art.

PHE: How do you define psychohistory?

DJF: I am not sure how to define psychohistory. It would depend on which historian is practicing it and in what specific context. Psychohistory presupposes the primacy of psychology as the motivating force in history. In exploring the character structure of various personalities in history, psychohistorians privilege the understanding of drive and defense if they embrace a conflict model; of trauma and dissociation if they embrace a deficit or relational model; or of grandiosity and self-devaluation if they embrace a self psychological or intersubjective model. Contemporary psychohistorians may be reluctant to pathologize their subjects, emphasizing the creative and transformational possibilities of individual experience. They would insist on the concept of over-determination in terms of reflecting on the psychological motives of individuals in frameworks not of their choosing. Each of these approaches can add a crucial dimension of understanding missing from conventional historical accounts. The latter tends to posit a rationalism, pragmatism, and self-interest on the part of historical actors that appears naive to those grounded in depth psychology. I also think good psychohistorians may contribute to the understanding of collective behavior and group psychology, to what French Annales historians call “mentalite.”

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PHE: When and why did you develop interest in French and Western European history, which led to you becoming fluent in both?

DJF: I was always interested in history. I did well in social studies and had an aptitude to remember narratives and to analyze historical phenomena. It stoked my curiosity. It still does. I like to tell and to listen to stories. I developed an early interest in my own family’s history, in Jewish history, and in the history of Western European cultural and intellectual life, which seemed pertinent (the word we used then was relevant) to understanding and then changing history in the present. I became fascinated by the history of revolutions from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution, the history of socialism and communism, and to ideas and cultural movements that were subversive. Psychoanalysis, at least early psychoanalysis, appeared to fit this model as a revolution in mind. I initially saw it as a way of challenging aspects of bourgeois morality and conformism, of middle class respectability and hypocrisy; it helped me to develop a more profound grasp of the individual’s unconscious dynamics, his or her sexuality, fantasies, and affective states. It was critically important in understanding trauma and the role of deficit and vulnerability in the inner world of the individual. It opened access to the dynamics of narcissism, of primitive states of resentment and envy, sadism and masochism, and the deepest longings and insatiable desires of the individual. I was impressed with how the early generations of analysts, beginning with Freud, would challenge some of the standard clichés about reason, self-interest, morality, and conventional ways of thinking about the individual in society.

Psychoanalysis also resonated with my own personal dynamics and with an imperative to understand my family. Reading Freud helped me to understand my family system and myself. Studying and transmitting the contemporary analytic literature does the same. I am currently teaching seminars on the English Object Relations School. This opens up vast insights into the inner world of my patients and myself, to the arena of the internal object, to the dynamics of countertransference, and to the significance of the analytic dyad. As to fluency in French and Western European cultural history, I would be more modest about it. I have a certain base of knowledge. I have not always been able to keep up with the literature since I transitioned to become a full time analyst. I have preferred to investigate a given author or theme, say Sartre or the

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theme of anti-Semitism, in-depth rather than focusing on a general overview. I have privileged depth over surface. This was true of my training as a classical psychoanalyst, where depth is emphasized. As a cultural historian, it was the decisive influence of culture or ideology on the minds and behavior of individuals. Only recently in thinking about the approaches of Foucault and Lacan (and certain contemporary painters and artists) have I been able to appreciate the importance of surfaces. The unconscious is present on the surface, in language, and in obvious modes of communication. We don’t have to plunge to the depths. We just need to open our ears, minds, eyes, and hearts to be receptive to it.

PHE: Why did you choose to write about Bettelheim, Lacan, and Rolland?

DJF: I choose to write about Romain Rolland for both political and intellectual reasons. Curiously, Rolland was a hero to two of the professors I most esteemed, George Mosse and Harvey Goldberg. Mosse was my major professor and a fabulous lecturer and distinguished scholar with a vast knowledge of early modern and modern European history. He had an uncanny, generative knack for raising fabulous questions, questions that opened up areas of research and investigation. I believe he supervised over 29 dissertations, his students producing first-rate scholarship in contemporary European history. Goldberg was a highly valued European social historian at the University of Wisconsin, a scholar with a photographic memory and an unparalleled orator—actually an oratorical genius. Rolland was one of the most exceptional and earliest writers to oppose the Great War. I came to him in the context of opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War. I was unconsciously looking for someone who had the courage and insight to protest the war, go against the prevailing nationalist, militarist, and imperialist forces of that period. He was influential in developing a pacifist and Gandhian point of view, his biography of Gandhi putting the Mahatma on the cultural map not only in Western Europe but also in America and Asia. I was preoccupied, probably obsessed, by the theme of the responsibility of the intellectual. Noam Chomsky wrote an influential essay with that title, published in The New York Review of Books. Rolland was such a responsible intellectual, speaking truth to power and conscience to power. I also found his evolution from internationalist to pacifist to anti-fascist to fellow traveler of communism worth researching and pondering. I guess I was trying to find out the deeper motivations and

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limits of the engaged intellectual stance. Obviously many of my generation of baby boomers, who came into consciousness in the 1960’s, were deeply educated and inspired by Camus and Sartre. This was clearly the case for me. I saw Rolland as a precursor to Camus and Sartre. (They did not, but it did not bother me.) Other committed intellectuals stamped their imprint upon me in the 60’s, including Herbert Marcuse, R. D. Laing, C. Wright Mills, and Franz Fanon.

I came to Lacan in my years of living in Paris in the middle 1970’s. I was alienated from America, from American politics, and in some ways all things American. I participated in a post-doctoral seminar with the social historian Georges Haupt on “the geography of Marxism.” Marxism was beginning its eclipse, though we were unaware of it. We studied the penetration and diffusion of Marxism into Western Europe and the world from Kautsky to the present. When I write about the history of psychoanalysis, I still borrow from the methodology of Haupt’s seminar, now looking at the resistance to and adaptation of analytic ideas and practices. This plays into my interest in the history of psychoanalysis and the history of sexuality. My Paris years coincided with the structuralist moment in France, the age of Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida.

My former wife, Clarice Fisher, became interested in Lacan, carefully reading and annotating Lacan’s medical doctoral thesis, a case study of a paranoid patient. Lacan was lecturing in Paris; in fact, it was a happening scene, a place for the “tout Paris,” including some of his patients. I regret never having gone to hear him lecture. I told myself I wouldn’t be able to understand his French (which was probably true). But I think I was going against the current by not attending his lectures. He was popular so I decided I wouldn’t be part of the crowd idealizing and worshipping him. There is a funny vignette about encountering a young Parisian couple in the summer of l975, who asserted that Lacan’s texts, his “Écrits,” were now “the revolution.” That is, that the cultural revolution of the 1960’s was over, and that Lacan’s understanding of language and the linguistic unconscious was the heir to the emancipatory potential of the human sciences. I thought of them as somewhat ridiculous, but their words stuck with me. When I returned to America, I started to study Lacan more closely. Sherry Turkle’s book on Lacan, Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud’s French Revolution, stoked my curiosity. After many years of teaching Lacan at

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analytic institutes, I think there is much merit and brilliance in many of his ideas, as well as a lot of wildness, irresponsibility, and nonsense. But he remains a major part of my analytic repertoire and I still hear his words and counsel as useful counters to thinking conventionally and being smug about my own insights and understanding of my patients. I believe I was the first person to deliver a formal paper on Lacan at the meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1980.

With Bettelheim, the story is more complicated and more ambivalent. I first heard his name mentioned in Mosse’s lectures. Mosse always put his students onto writing that was controversial, textured, and penetrating. I remember seeing Bettelheim interviewed on the Dick Cavett television show in the late 1960’s. I found him outrageously arrogant and authoritarian. He was extremely dismissive of the anti-war students and of the entire social and political movement to end the War in Vietnam and issue in radical change. I said out loud to my friends, if this is the voice of psychoanalysis, then psychoanalysis is now the enemy. Things changed when I started to study his works, above all his early writings on Nazi concentration camps, including his own incarceration. I was moved and found areas of agreement with his essay, “Freud and Man’s Soul,” resonating to his empathy and to his portrait of a humanistic, soulful Freud. I think his fairytale book, The Uses of Enchantment, is a masterpiece of applied psychoanalysis, one of the classics in the literature. Actually, it is a rare sample of the wisdom literature of psychoanalysis. I remember sending him several of my publications; he replied quickly and in a friendly and supportive manner. He was both receptive to and critical of my writings on Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and Freud’s relationship and debates with Romain Rolland.

When Bettelheim moved to Los Angeles in the late 1980’s, I wrote, asking him if he were open to a visit. He immediately called me and we developed an intense, mutually affectionate friendship. I saw him often, had meals with him, took him to concerts, got him to talk about his life and the history of psychoanalysis. He offered to send me patients. I convinced him to go into therapy with a local German-speaking colleague. I went to him for advice on intimate matters. He was the most naturally empathic and attuned man I have ever met. He could also be harsh, cruel, and go directly to my unconscious conflicts with an amazing clarity and insensitivity. A man who carried many residues of shame, he

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could be shaming. In short, he was a complicated and a difficult man. He once told me he regretted that I did not know him as a younger man. A recurring theme of our conversations was suicide, his intention to not go on existing and his desire to take his life. I was in my middle 40’s during the two brief years of this friendship. I was just beginning to start my family. I would leave these discussions about suicide exhausted and sometimes numb. But they were unbelievably intimate, however paradoxical that may sound. They were part of my maturational process and I cherish their memory.

I believe my Bettelheim book, a book of collected essays on him, was an attempt to work through my ambivalence about him and male paternal figures. I have been drawn to powerful, charismatic, brilliant, and flamboyant Central European father figures. I was fortunate enough to develop an understanding of these idealizing transference dynamics in my training analysis with Rudolf Ekstein, a Viennese analyst and philosopher. Incidentally, I learned what topics to avoid with Bettelheim. For example, I never spoke to him about the 60’s, about the student radicals of that era, of the project to fuse Freud and Marx. Yet our conversations were rich and thought-provoking. I believe another motive to write about him was to oppose the mindless current of Bettelheim bashing that occurred after his suicide. He was no longer around to answer. I tried to write a balanced and nuanced account of the man and his writings. I hope his work will be revived and that students, scholars, and clinicians will take another look at Bettelheim. There is a great deal of substance and nuance in his writings. It is too easy to dismiss him as a patient abuser and bully.

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

DJF: I am most proud of two pieces of writing. The first is one published in my late 20s on the relationship and debates between Freud and Romain Rolland (“Sigmund Freud and Romain Rolland: The Terrestrial Animal and his Great Oceanic Friend”). This essay is based on archival work I did in the 1970’s at the Archives Romain Rolland in Paris on Boulevard du Montparnasse, Rolland’s former apartment. It deals with the private and public aspects of their debate on what Rolland called the “oceanic feeling” spilling over into Chapter One of Freud’s magnificent and ambiguous Civilization and Its Discontents. It also contextualizes and explicates Freud’s 1936 paper, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” written to honor Rolland’s 70^th birthday. This is a beautiful text, brimming with insight and self-analysis of the 80-year-old Freud,

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still at the peak of his analytic power. Besides having discovered some unpublished letters from Freud to Rolland and Rolland to Freud, the essay concludes with a section psychoanalyzing Freud based on their friendship and arguments. Quite audacious for a kid still in his 20’s.

The paper also alerted me to the power and importance of affects, given that the oceanic feeling was a feeling, which in that period of my life I tended to disavow. What I discovered in my analysis of Freud became the dominant issues in my ten-year training analysis with Ekstein. I did not recognize it at the time. This essay was published in a French translation in a psychoanalytic journal and in “American Imago.” Its publication helped to get me accepted for analytic training, marking the beginning of my transition from a historian to a practicing psychoanalyst. I realized one could go only so far in psychoanalyzing others until I myself had been analyzed and before undergoing psychoanalytic training. A follow up essay, “Reading Freud’s ‘Civilization and Its Discontents,’” offered my own critical analysis of the oceanic feeling from the point of view of the dynamics of narcissism and the ways in which the oceanic feeling may veil powerful feelings of anger and aggression.

A second favorite paper is called “Father’s Day 1994.” It is about my last visit to my father at a nursing home three months prior to his death. I tried to write something deeply intimate about his condition without recourse to analytic jargon or academic prose. It helped me during a period of intense mourning, writing becoming a form of grief work. It is revealing about my own state of mind during that period, disclosing the subjective states of feeling helpless in witnessing the decline and death of an elderly parent. This piece has been republished several times. It reverberates with an audience unlike anything else I have written. It is an emotionally honest and authentic piece of writing dealing with a significant rite of passage in my life and obviously in others.

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

DJF: I am currently working on a critical analysis of an early autobiographical song by Leonard Cohen, “Famous Blue Raincoat.” I examine the tenderness and sorrow in the song, the role of psychic splitting, the alternation between omnipotence and sad, nihilistic, and suicidal feelings. Listening to Cohen’s songs have be-

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come a source of joy and stimulation to me, even though he has been part of my psychic playlist since the 1960’s. I hope to write about it without jargon and in a direct fashion with respect for the composer and yet include a direct expression of my subjectivity and feelings. I plan to send it to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for publication. I also have a case study of a narcissistic patient who had a pattern of lying in his intimate life. It is someone I treated for over 15 years, making it an interesting study of the false self/true self opposition. I recently presented it in China, where the Chinese clinicians showed a genuine interest in working with narcissistic patients.

PHE: What is your primary affiliation?

DJF: Psychoanalysis is my primary affiliation. I teach and supervise at two analytic institutes. I have been a training and supervising analyst at the Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis for the past 25 years. I am on the Board of Directors at the New Center for Psychoanalysis. I recently won an award I am quite proud of: Faculty of the Year Award for 2015. Still, my primary responsibility is to my patients and to the psychoanalytic cause, which I still see as a socio-political and cultural movement.

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

DJF: Formal, clinical psychoanalytic training has been fundamental in my life. I believe it is vital for those doing psychohistory, or psychoanalytically informed history. Without it, the issues of personality remain abstract and intellectualized. Psychohistorians, without clinical training and without having had the experience of a long character analysis, can sound wild, non-empathic, lacking in the capacity to understand fragile persons often in fragile circumstances. I deal with “The Question of Psychohistory” and these themes in an essay in my book, Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition. It is a detailed discussion of Peter Gay’s Freud for Historians and Peter Loewenberg’s Decoding the Past. I also published a detailed analysis of Manuel’s A Portrait of Isaac Newton in that same book; it is called “Narcissistic Themes in a Psychobiography of Isaac Newton.”

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

DJF: I have published several autobiographical introductions

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to books I have written. In part, everything I write is autobiographical. I only write about things that I care about, things that have meaning or multiple meanings for me. I have gotten away from “objective history,” even though I was trained in that discourse. I was always suspicious about it. But I am also suspicious about overly subjective forms of writing. Trusting and suspicious. I am also trusting and suspicious of my own interpretive work with patients, but often not suspicious enough.

PHE: What books were important to your development?

DJF: The most important psychohistorical books for me include:

Frank Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton, which I have already written about here.

Erik Erikson’s Gandhi’s Truth, particularly his chapter “An Open Letter to the Mahatma,” dealing with his countertransference in a powerful and poignant manner.

Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven, a beautiful analytically oriented biography on a figure I revere and whose music I find inspiring.

Vamik Volkan’s Nixon, about which I have been highly critical, a text to be studied for what not to do in terms of psychohistory.

Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment for a subtle and incisive approach to the psychology of fairytales and the importance of the relational experience of parents reading to their children. The book is less a historical study than a reading of the fairytale literature from the point of view of an astute analytic literary critic with vast knowledge of the psychology of children and the dilemmas of parents.

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

DJF: Regarding identification with the fathers and high achieving, I am not sure about this. I haven’t studied the question, or examined the research findings. I would like to write a paper on the role of fathers in the formation of psychoanalysts, with particular emphasis on how many of us had fathers as physicians. It would be fascinating to know about these early identifications. There are five or six individuals who fit this description in Los Angeles alone—

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that is, analysts whose fathers were doctors, caretakers.

PHE: Please tell us about the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium and how it furthers applied psychoanalysis (psychohistory)?

DJF: I have written on the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium in my piece on Loewenberg in Clio’s Psyche. I have been attending these conferences for over 25 years. At the New Center for Psychoanalysis we are trying to get this annual conference at Lake Arrowhead funded. It has been highly successful in terms of encouraging academics who use analytic methods in their research, and stimulating graduate students to present their work and to consider formal analytic training. The U.C.I.P.C. brings together academics and clinicians in an informal and relaxed fashion, fostering dialogue and critical exchange. It gathers together three generations of students and professors, apprentices and master clinicians. Many of us have presented early drafts of works at the conference. Early versions of my papers on Stoller and erotic countertransference, as well as my Leonard Cohen paper, originated up there at the “magic mountain,” our private name for this lovely spot in the San Bernardino Mountains. It is a wonderful and unique association. We need more like it.

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

DJF: I have been fortunate to have had many male mentors. I believe that I unconsciously sought them out. These have included George Mosse, Harvey Goldberg, Frank Manuel, Michel de Certeau, Robert Stoller, Peter Loewenberg, Bruno Bettelheim, and Rudolf Ekstein. Germaine Bree was a female role model and mentor. I have written about all of them. They continue to influence me, to help me organize my thoughts, and to make me feel safe and protected when I don’t understand something clinical or intellectual or political, which is quite often. I have been fortunate in my choice of and experiences with these ego ideals. One down side: it may have impeded my ability to find my own voice, my own unique way of understanding. It may account for a long period of my apprenticeship and a susceptibility to discipleship, which I continue to struggle against. I now believe that these identifications and counter-identifications exist in some complicated dialectical relationship, informing my clinical work and my writing. It is not so easy

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to disentangle these identifications. I am also increasingly critical of hero worshippers, knowing full well I have been one of them. This began as a child with my love of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the “Boys of Summer” team. My earliest heroes were Duke Snyder, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Carl Erskine, and Sandy Koufax. Perhaps I have never entirely grown up in terms of those dynamics, but it may help keep me young, playful, vital, and open to new experiences. It has changed as I became a parent, mentor and transference figure to others. It is still strange to be idealized by others. I am becoming more comfortable with it, seeing its healing qualities and its potential to center, hold, and contain vulnerable individuals, while simulating thinking and creative activity.

PHE: Thank you for sharing your story and insights with us.

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