Professional and Personal Insights

Psychoanalysis is, among other things: 1) a therapy; 2) a humane 21st-century world view which bears both the tolerance of Enlightenment secularism and the Romantic assertion of human

Page 33

individuality; 3) an investigative research method; and 4) a mode of perceiving human interactions, data, events, and behaviors. The first category, the clinical therapeutic encounter between analysand and an analyst, is experientially necessary to understand and to make full use of the remaining three categories.

The critical difference between those who use only theory and those who have a thorough familiarity with a hands-on clinical situation is that the psychoanalyst uses his subjective self empathically to know the “other” in the emotional field they jointly occupy. This field may be the chaos of a research project or the inner pain of an analysand. The natural syncretism between the research and the interpretive tasks of the historian and psychoanalyst is that both construct complex narrative explanations with hierarchies or orders of “causes.” These reach from the common-sense rational to the less understood, sometimes intuited, emotional, unconscious, even irrational, motives. Perceiving, framing, and tackling a historical problem is similar to working with a patient and that patient’s life. The tool of cognition is the self — the emotional insight and sensibility of the researcher. An institutional benefit for academics of informal psychoanalytic training is the potential of creating joint psychoanalytic-academic seminars, of placing graduate students in private low-fee analyses or psychoanalytic clinic analyses, and of being able to draw on and instrumentalize their own clinical experience. Among the institutional benefits we may point to is that the Robert J. Stoller Foundation has for the past five years offered essay prizes and research funds for psychoanalytically-oriented research to both graduate students and post-doctoral scholars. Two annual Hayman Endowment Fellowships aid dissertation-level graduate students. The Committee on Research and Special Training of the American Psychoanalytic Association is this year for the first time sponsoring both a psychoanalytic essay prize and research funds.

The downside of dual training is the substantial commitment of time and energy necessary to acquire an entirely new, or even to create a unique hybrid, profession. The academic must undergo an apprenticeship and process of socialization; learn a literature, bibliography and nosology; and acquire the novel and idiosyncratic thoughtstyle and the esoteric coded language of a new discipline. A demanding program of training draws on the same intellectual and emotional resources that go toward research and publication, so that research “productivity” is initially delayed. The demonstrated promise of psychoanalytic understanding applied to any other field becomes more and more valuable, perhaps necessary, as the scholar is willing to draw more on the subjective and make greater use of creative imagination. To the extent that the historian uses psychoanalysis, it allows him to more effectively move back and forth across the internal boundaries between conscious, preconscious, and unconscious processes. The barriers will become more permeable, easing insight to relationships between discrete, apparently incoherent, categories, data, and feelings. There is a good reason why psychoanalysis is so ubiquitous among writers, artists, actors, and those in the world of literature, film, and theater. These craftsmen of language, image, and symbol welcome the tools of psychoanalysis as they develop their internal and

Page 34

most private resources. Any ambitious institution must weigh the quality and originality of work as well as its quantity. We wish to have not only publication, but discerning original publication. An institution’s very integrity depends upon a willingness to acknowledge the unique value of the very recent availability of full interdisciplinary training, including clinical training in psychoanalysis, whatever the costs in time and immediate publication.

Some critics express the fear that acquiring clinical skills will seduce the scholar to give up teaching and writing and lose his academic identity. This has not been our experience in California where we have trained over 30 university social scientists and humanists in clinical psychoanalysis. Many of them are members of the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium. The isolation of solo clinical practice and the feuding of the psychoanalytic institutional community are not that alluring! The cases which I know of where researchers became full-time clinicians are those where an academic career was not an option. An identity as a university teacher and researcher is a precious, hard-fought achievement not lightly to be thrown away. The opportunity to have and to train students, to experience that at the end of a semester they know things they would not have otherwise, is a rare satisfaction only to be compared with the experience of working with a person therapeutically and helping him to turn his life around.

The creation of discrete academic disciplines is historical, their boundaries are arbitrary. In the 17th and 18th centuries philosophy freed herself from theology. In the 19th century history as a discipline liberated herself from philosophy. Political science, sociology, and anthropology are essentially 20th-century creations. Artificial disciplinary boundaries have quickly become institutionalized and rigid, each with its discrete subculture and guild. But neither the human mind nor the real world are so compartmentalized. Knowledge, understanding, and problem-solving do not lend themselves to narrow scotomized approaches. Fields such as history and psychoanalysis must be related to each other by the researcher, not statically, but as independent variables, each with its own context and imperatives. Creativity requires open listening. It draws on the perspectives and findings of many disciplines as it demands their integral and interpretive use.

Now it is time to turn to my personal motivation for dual training:

“In the beginning was the family….”

I was born in Hamburg, Germany, in August, 1933, the year of Hitler’s seizure of power (Machtergreifung). My intense conviction of the value of dual training has a personal, subjective source as well as the power of its subsequent value for my own work as a historian. Mom was a public health nurse, large in heart and body, practical and efficient, a convert to Judaism from the Lutheran tradition of her north-German family, idealistic, a socialist activist on the political left in a Weimar Republic increasingly threatened by the extreme right. Dad, the son of a distinguished liberal Jewish educator, writer, and poet, was a university psychiatrist and a humanist who wrote on Kant, Lichtenberg, and Nietzsche.

Although it was the first months of Nazi rule, Father saw that it was urgent to act immediately. I treasure the soft-covered, mottled brown notebook which holds the record of his search for a place of refuge from the Nazis for his wife, his new baby, and himself. The addresses of medical boards and universities, written in his hand and checked off, speak of pride and self-esteem, a determination to maintain his identity — he was a psychiatrist, and he was not going to end up doing anything less. Penciled entries tell of his travels exploring the prospects of our new life: “Institute of Industrial Psychology, Aldwhich House, London, WC 2”; “Medical Council, 44 Hallam Street, Portland Place, W1”; Scotland: “Royal College of Physicians, D.L. Eadie, Esq., 49 Lauriston Place”; “Ireland: Belfast, Queen’s University; and Dublin: “Trinity College”; in May: “Holland: 15. V. 33, Prof. Cohen, van Breestraat 172”; and “France: Comité des intellectuals, Rue de Poinbiens, Bureau 330.” The extent of my father’s sense of futility, despair, rejection, and even desperation, in seeking a refuge may only be inferred. Yet, there was courage and toughness, a willingness to explore terra incognita — strange, inhospitable, unknown places. Behind father’s fantasies was the reality of his resourceful wife, who would create a home anywhere. There were melancholy lists of lands, spelled in German, organized by the prospective ease of entering medical practice: those with “only an examination: Albanien, Bulgarien, Ägypten, Griechenland, Haiti, Jamaica, Madras, Nicaragua, Samoa, Yukon”; those “without an exam: Abessynien, Arabien, Kongo, Bengal, Bombay,

Page 35

Borneo, Burma, China, Zypern, Hong Kong, Irak, Madera, Marakko, Mauritius, Palästina, Panama, Persien, Salvador, Siam, Sudan, Syrien, Tanger.”

In October, 1933, my parents with their six-week-old infant left Germany forever. They traveled to the other end of the Earth — to Shanghai. Their friend, Nurse Milli, who helped them pack, wrote to her fiance: “They are traveling into the blue mist [auf blauen Dunst] to China.” My earliest memories are smells of freshly steamed rice and the aroma of Chinese tea. I still abhor human crowding, not only in the streets, but at home — the cook, the house boy, the chauffeur, my Ama — servants with incomprehensible layers of authority and power to whom I could not make myself understood. When recently I — for the first time — returned to Shanghai en route to visiting our 22-year-old daughter, who is teaching in Beijing, I saw how hard life there still is. There is not enough of anything — except people. I imagined how difficult life must have been for refugees over sixty years ago. To my wife I said, “Only Adolf Hitler could make me move here with an infant.”

Perhaps only Hitler in combination with the courage and resourcefulness of my parents could have given me the background and incentive to acquire my own psychoanalytic training in addition to pointing my intellectual life toward the study of 20th-century European cultural history, Austro-German history, and political psychology. It was above all the models of my mother’s activist compassion and my father’s vision and tenacity that helped me to ignore the pragmatic “wisdom” regularly preached at me by colleagues and administrators, the conventional wisdom of not deviating from the usual methods of investigation and professional advancement, and encouraged me to take the time to explore my own terra incognita. Whatever the personal sources, I have been privileged to be part of the breakthrough to a new openness among American psychoanalysts, which encourages full psychoanalytic training for those of us in scholarly fields. The opportunity which is now open to my academic colleagues is too uniquely valuable to be lost to pragmatism or safety and timidity, to a fear of short-term sacrifice for personally and professionally valuable, long-term goals.

Page 36