Benjamin B. Rubinstein: A Finnish-American Psychoanalyst

Benjamin “Ben” Björn Rubinstein was born in Helsinki in 1905 to a Swedish-speaking Finnish-Jewish family with ties to Poland and Russia. After searching for his identity in Paris in 1925-26, he found and was inspired by Freud’s writings, especially Totem and Taboo (1913). He started his medical studies in Helsinki and later became a psychoanalyst. He moved to London in 1936 where, from 1937-39, he specialized in neurology at internationally

-renowned National Hospital on Queen Square and in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital.

At that time, he also had his own analysis with Eva Rosenfeld. It is a curious fact that Rosenfeld herself was in London in analysis with Melanie Klein and moved closer to Klein’s views than Anna Freud’s. While in London, Rubinstein witnessed the crucial tension between the Freudians and the Kleinians, and was later sympathetic to Klein’s views, though she also acknowledged that Rubenstein was a Freudian. Professor Adolf Grünbaum, who dedicated his work The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984) to Rubinstein, wrote: “I respected Ben Rubinstein immensely and was also very fond of him, but I never knew why he had thought that Melanie Klein had contributed something worthwhile to psychoanalysis” (Personal communication, December 3, 2006). Rubinstein shared with Grünbaum an interest in the philosophy of science, and both were critics of psychoanalytic metapsychology, though Rubinstein remained a practicing psychoanalyst.

When World War II broke out, Rubinstein returned to Finland and worked as an army doctor during the Winter War (1939-40) and the Continuation War (1941-44) against the Soviet Union. He gained experience with the soldiers’ neurological and psychic disorders and their personal crises. After World War II (1945-47), Rubinstein continued his specialization in neurology and psychiatry at the Lapinlahti Hospital in Helsinki and gave impetus to some of his colleagues to start their psychoanalytic training. In the fall of 1947, Rubinstein moved with his psychologist and photographer wife Dinah Rosenthal to Topeka, where he had received a position at the Menninger Clinic, first as a research assistant and soon as a psychiatrist.

Page 163

Karl A. Menninger, the charismatic and impetuous leader of the Clinic, was Rubinstein’s training analyst and supervisor for a year, a requirement the Finn needed to complete his training. When Rubinstein wrote a theoretical diploma work criticizing Freud’s sexual theory and energy concept, insisting that psychoanalytic clinical theory should inevitably be bound to neurophysiology, Menninger held the work to be offensive and arrogant. He felt insulted by Rubinstein, who planned to leave for New York. Menninger had raised Rubinstein as his gifted analytic son who suddenly appeared. Through negative transference, he saw him as a traitor packed with “narcissism,” “unanalyzed issues,” and “aggression” against psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis, as well as gravely “lacking insight” (Menninger’s letter to Rubinstein, February 13, 1953).

Menninger went to extremes by circulating a rumor that Rubinstein was paranoid; thus he managed, for some months, to delay Rubinstein’s acceptance to the American Psychoanalytic Association and to the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1954. However, Rubinstein had written a new clinical diploma work and was accepted as a psychoanalyst, first in Topeka in 1953 and then in New York, where he had moved in 1953. After this traumatic instructor candidate relationship, Rubinstein started his psychoanalytic and psychiatric practice in New York in 1954 and continued it until one month before his death in 1989.

In the 1950s, Rubinstein held seminars on psychoanalytic theory at New York University and on psychoanalytic research at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1962, he was appointed assistant professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. With Hartvig Dahl, Rubinstein led the American Psychoanalytic Association’s empirical research project on psychoanalytic interpretations and hypotheses from 1970. With his friends Robert R. Holt, George S. Klein, and Emanuel Peterfreund, Rubinstein founded Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Science (1972-76). It was an annual meant to advance integrative and interdisciplinary studies that included articles on the philosophy of psychoanalysis; clinical, developmental and linguistic studies; information processing models; and, in the first volume (1972), a psych historical article by Robert Jay Lifton and a psycho-biographical article by Bernard C. Meyer. The annual was continued as Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought (1978-2003).

Although Rubinstein contributed to each volume of Psycho-

Page 164

analysis and Contemporary Science, he was not active in publishing his writings. His personality is described by his relatives and friends as somewhat socially shy and reclusive but warm and outspoken in private discussion. For example, his antiestablishment and “no-nonsense” attitude (also to psychoanalytic institutions and Jewish religion and ritualism), as well as his atheism and cosmopolitanism, have been mentioned. One of his relatives, Professor Ewert Linder, remembered that while driving a car Rubinstein exclaimed, “Life in New York makes it clear that Marxism is an aim that should be reached but cannot anyway be reached here” (Personal communication, March 8, 2007). On psychoanalysis, he commented to Linder that psychoanalysts in the 1980s treated what is unknown and that one day the “physiological and biological background of the disorders will be found, and the molecules will be put into order” (Personal communication, March 8, 2007).

Robert R. Holt edited Rubinstein’s scholarship in Psychoanalysis and the Philosophy of Science: Collected Papers of Benjamin B. Rubinstein (1997). In his preface, Holt reports that through the years Rubinstein was treated rudely by the gatekeepers of psychoanalytic journals. This is not surprising because Rubinstein perceived many basic concepts of psychoanalysis (the ego, the superego, the id, the unconscious wish, sexual energy) as “only” theoretical concepts poorly connected with neurophysiology and brain states. For example, what psychoanalysts call (and interpret as) unconscious wishes are for Rubinstein behavioral dispositions anchored to their neural basis, and there is no need to refer to mental states and keep to dualistic conceptions.

However, Rubinstein moderated his extreme stance by admitting that there are two ways of talking in psychoanalysis: a “person” view and an “organism” view. The former is typical of psychoanalytic clinical theories and practice while the latter is typical of the natural sciences and psychoanalytic metapsychology. Rubinstein’s criticism of such metapsychology proposed that psychoanalytic clinical observations and theories should be widened to “extra clinical” connections, that is, to emerging scientific endeavors in the fields of neurosciences and cognitive research. In this regard, Rubinstein was an early predecessor of neuro-psychoanalysis because he emphasized, for example, that the psychoanalytic concepts must not conflict with the results of the neurophysiological studies.

To evaluate the scientific status and validity of psychoanal-

Page 165

ysis, Rubinstein considered it necessary to clarify the nature of psychoanalytic hypotheses. He made a distinction between “general,” “special,” and “particular” clinical hypotheses and claimed that psychoanalysts in their practice are tied to the “particular” (individual-centered) clinical hypotheses, and even psychoanalytic theories have mostly bypassed “general” clinical hypotheses. Rubinstein stressed that psychoanalytic hypotheses are “probabilistic” because we do not know for sure what motivates complex human actions. Even then, psychoanalytic hypotheses can be genuine scientific hypotheses that refer to hitherto unknown processes.

One of Rubinstein’s last texts (from 1983) addressed tragedy. He opposed the ego-psychological conceptualization of catharsis. Looking at cultural history in Sophocles’, Shakespeare’s, and Albert Camus’ writings, Rubinstein discarded the idea about the necessary impact of catharsis in a human’s emotional life and maintained that human emotions are derived from the congruence or incongruence between the expectations and occurrences a minimalistic and cognitive reading of the classics, characteristic of Rubinstein’s personal style.

Page 166