In Memoriam: L. Bryce Boyer (1916-2000)

In the century since the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, a handful of psychoanalysts have devoted entire careers to the exploration of the unconscious from clinical material together with material gathered via ethnographic fieldwork, historical scholarship, folklore, religion, art, music, workplace organizations, or other “social” institutions and units. On August 9, 2000, L. Bryce Boyer, MD, one of the most fertile minds in this effort, died in Walnut Creek, California, at age 84. To the end, he was developing. His late works read like the Verdi of Otello and Falstaff, and like the Beethoven of the final quartets.

Although L. Bryce Boyer and I never met, I feel that I knew him and was known by him far better than many people I have known “in person.” I corresponded with him and with his wife, anthropologist Ruth M. Boyer, for nearly 20 years, and we spoke many times by phone. I regard him as a mentor as well as a scholar and example. I shall deeply grieve his loss.

L. Bryce Boyer was born in Vernal, Utah, and grew up Mormon. He received his MD from Stanford University in 1942. He practiced psychoanalysis in Berkeley—the hub of his work around the world. Initially an orthodox analyst, he was later influenced by Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, and most recently by David Rosenfeld and Thomas Ogden. At the beginning of “A Conversation with L. Bryce Boyer,” Sue von Baeyer asked him to identify “a few ways his thinking had changed over the course of his life work” (in Countertransference and Regression, 1999, p. 241). Early in his reply he said,

How can one possibly answer a question like this, if one doesn’t talk about the life influence of having had parents who hated each other, and a mother who hated her children, and a mother who tried to torture her children? Tortured me, not her second son. A person who in childhood has lived on a farm, lived on the edge of an Indian reservation, has investigated gopher holes and bird nests and pulled turds out of turkeys that were constipated. I early learned that there was no possibility of believing anything I was told. Nothing told to me by my mother at any rate, and she was the only one who was really important to me. No—my father, it turned out, was very important to me, even kept me sane, although I saw him very little. But my mother was a chronic liar and thief, and sadist. At the same time I adored her. I learned from my experience with my mother that there was no possibility of believing anything I was told. This was combined with her being always grossly hysteric and periodically frankly delusional. So I had to discard what I was told, and I learned never to believe anything I was told, that I had to find out for myself what I should trust and believe. And I was a scientist. I was always a scientist, and I always believed in secondary logic, secondary process logic. At the same time I was highly intuitive. With my mother, for example, I could make a pretty good guess of when she was going to

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 have a temper tantrum, or when she was going to have a paranoid attack, or when she was going to come after me with a knife and try to kill me, or wound me in some way. I usually got some glimpses, so that I was able to divert her attention in some way, sometimes I was able to show her that what she had in mind wasn’t so. And I actually only got one knife cut deep enough to leave a scar (pp. 241-242).

His clinical writing and scholarship are meticulous. The bibliographies of his papers look like library holdings. At the same time, his writing reveals the presence of writer, patient, informant, and culture. Boyer’s work has been especially well-accepted and influential in Central and South America, where he lectured at conferences frequently. Much of his writing has been translated into seven languages. For most of the 30 years from 1965 to 1994, Boyer was an editor in various capacities of The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, a series founded by Gézà Róheim. I had the pleasure of co-editing with him and his wife the final volume, Number 19, Essays in Honor of George A. Devos.

For 35 years, beginning in 1957, he conducted fieldwork among the Mescalero and Chiricahua Apache, together with Ruth Boyer. He also did fieldwork among the Upper Tanana Indians in the Yukon, the Yukon Delta Inuits in Alaska, the Laplanders in northern Finland, and the Quechua in highland Peru. Focusing on transference and resistance, he practiced psychoanalysis among the Apaches, who adopted him as a shaman.

He pioneered in the cross-cultural application of the Rorschach Test. Noticing immense personality differences between the Chiricahua and Mescalero Apaches, who had markedly different histories, he discovered that the Rorschach corroborated these personality distinctions. He approached the gifted Rorschacher, Bruno Klopfer, who tutored him on administering and interpreting Rorschach inkblot cards. Boyer had a knack for seeking out, and working with, the best in any field.

A theme throughout his clinical and ethnographic work is the role of projection and projective identification in clinical work, in individual life, in family life, and in culture and social structure. It underlies his advocacy of psychoanalysis with regressed patients, people who had been regarded as unanalyzable. He followed Róheim and Devereux in the practice of ethno-psychoanalysis. As Boyer said in the conversation with von Baeyer, “You must have the personal, emotional interplay of tolerating the introjection of whatever it is that’s being projected into you, and you must have the capacity to have the observing analytic third [a concept of Thomas Ogden] at the side of it so that you don’t react crudely to it” (p. 245). Countertransference was a powerful tool of understanding throughout Boyer’s life work.

Although not officially trained as a psychohistorian, he was one of its de facto practitioners for decades. He deserves to be more thoroughly read and incorporated into its literature. Let me offer some concluding thoughts on why I think Boyer is so important. He never “applies” clinical psychoanalysis in a biological, historical, or cultural vacuum. His research is as broad as it is deep. Both in his clinical and cross-cultural work, Boyer emphasizes the very early, “pre-oedipal,” foundation of all human life, and with it, the dire significance of early family relationships. His emphasis is on the relationship and emotional attitudes toward the baby and child. He then explores how childhood experience, transformed into conscious and unconscious structure, underlies such subsequent projective life as folklore, religion, and even adaptation. He includes developmental and group process considerations in all discussions of culture change, acculturation, shamanistic ritual and leadership, and cultural symbolism.

His “clinical” writing is as crucial to any psychohistorian as his “cross-cultural” writing, in its emphasis on the use as well as the limitations of countertransference—the therapist’s or observer’s emotional reaction to others—in understanding other people. One can learn much about the unconscious of others through our sensory, muscular, dermal, and visceral response to the historical situations and material we are encountering and studying. As part of the current social resistance to the unconscious in the form of political correctness, it has become fashionable not to speak of emotional or cultural “primitiveness.” Yet in Boyer’s clinical and cross-cultural studies alike, one of his persistent messages is the emotional primitiveness in us all.

Were I limited to recommending just two of his hundreds of articles, chapters, and books, I would suggest two books that deserve to be classics: Childhood and Folklore: A Psychoanalytic Study of Apache Personality (1979) and Countertransference and Regression (1999). He will be sorely missed by those who were touched by his

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 life. His published words are only part of that legacy.

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