Dual Careers and the Burden of Pain (article)

I became interested in psychoanalytic theory when I was a graduate student in politics at Princeton in the early 1960s. My initial models and influences were the works of Harold D. Lasswell, Erik H. Erikson, and my aunt Martha Wolfenstein. I characterized my own work as psycho-political, but was just as comfortable thinking of myself as a student of personality and politics.

I completed my doctoral studies in 1965 and came to UCLA the same year. I made a premature attempt to apply for psychoanalytic training and was accepted by a local institute. But the attempt was half-hearted: at the practical level my interests were rapidly becoming more political than psychoanalytic, and I let the training issue drop.

The next period was devoted, intellectually speaking, to developing my own version of psychoanalytic-Marxist theory. This included the idea, common in leftist circles, that theory and practice were mutually constitutive. I was therefore in the self-contradictory position of advocating psychoanalysis without ever having practiced it — or, indeed, without ever having experienced it. Moreover, for purely personal reasons I had undertaken a self-analysis. I learned something from this venture, but the upshot was the recognition that I had something to gain from actual psychoanalysis. Finally, by the mid-1970s (as a result of the determined efforts of Peter Loewenberg and others) the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute had a program for research candidates, which included funding to help defray the costs of the training analysis. I applied for and was accepted into this program.

My reactions to the training program were varied. From the beginning my own analysis was engaging and worthwhile. It lasted just over three years and it provided the foundation for further emotional development. I am profoundly grateful to my analyst, Ruth Aaron, for that experience. Theory seminars, by contrast, were not so gratifying. I entered the program after ten years of being the teacher, not the student, and of being intensively immersed in Freudian theory. It felt like a big step back to be a student of what I was accustomed to teaching. But I liked my fellow candidates and the teachers were a decent bunch, so that part of the program was tolerable. And the continuous case conferences were genuinely

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exciting.

The decisive part of the experience was treating patients under supervision. Along with my personal analysis, this is where the real learning took place. Also the real time-management problems: the combination of the various things analytic eventually took over 20 hours a week, while the university continued, appropriately, to demand a full-time commitment. Hence, it was my research (other than psychoanalysis as research) that suffered. Over time, however, I developed ways of balancing the three parts of my professional life: teaching, research, and analytic practice. So, while I maintain a substantial part-time clinical practice, I don’t feel that my productivity has suffered too much as a consequence.

During my training and after, my academic colleagues have been tolerant of psychoanalytic concerns. As noted above, no special allowance was made for the demands of training, but neither have I encountered hostility to research that is psychoanalytically-informed. (The fact that I am in the history of political theory is a buffer in this regard.)

The matter is more complex when it comes to my psychoanalytic colleagues. Psychoanalysis was overwhelmingly medical when I entered training. Consequently, research people, who lacked psychiatric training, were viewed with a certain skepticism. But there was also a kind of odd deference to academic sophistication. So, we lacked legitimacy in the one regard and were given too much of it in another. This evened out over time, however, as we proved to be adequate clinically and as personal relationships eventually eroded the distinctions of professional categories. Further, psychoanalysis in Los Angeles is no longer a male-dominated medical specialty. Perhaps it’s going a little too far to put it this way, but for the most part, psychoanalysts are just psychoanalysts. A core psychoanalytic identity places in the background the various professional pathways leading up to it.

This brings me to the central issue. There are those who pass through psychoanalytic training and come away from it fundamentally untouched. Perhaps they use psychoanalytic ideas in their research or, if they are therapists, in their clinical practice; but they do not become psychoanalysts. For others psychoanalysis really becomes an identity, or a vital component of one’s identity. One then is a psychoanalyst, which is quite a different thing from entertaining psychoanalytic ideas.

This sounds a bit like a psychoanalytic essentialism, so let me take a step back from it. Prior not only to my training, I was a convinced adherent of Freud’s metapsychology. I took the Oedipal situation as the core of analytic theory and adopted the canonical approach to the interpretation of dreams. Libido theory dropped away rapidly during training, as it became clear that affects and, especially, the capacity to tolerate unpleasurable affects, was the heart of the matter. In parallel fashion, I was drawn by my patients into the depths of pre-Oedipal issues. Klein, Winnicott, and Bion (along with feminist psychoanalytic writers like Dorothy Dinnerstein) proved to be of greater value than more orthodox theorists. And, technically, with respect to both dreams and clinical interaction generally, tracking details was displaced by a concern to identify and be able to stick with the central affects and essential intra-subjective and inter-subjective dramas.

These changes — to return to my prior point — were not, with respect to my own personal development, external. They were something more than ways of thinking about things — although they did give me new things to think about. Coupled with prolonged efforts to practice what Bion terms the “disciplined denial of memory and desire,” as well as to tolerate the maximum of anxiety with the minimum of defense, I find myself reacting to people and situations from a different and, I’d like to believe, deeper psychical location.

I’d also like to believe that my students have been the beneficiaries of these developments. I think I’m better able to listen, not just cognitively, but also to half-articulated emotional concerns. I’ve worked hard to try to understand group processes, and this spills over into seminar management. And being able to speak to developmental issues, especially as these are permeated by the problematics of race and gender, is often very helpful to undergraduates in particular.

This list of benefits could be extended, but it’s best to end on a cautionary note. Quite apart from time, psychoanalysis exacts a price from its practitioners. One has to be able to tolerate the presence of other people’s pain in oneself, not just during sessions but when they are over as well. Sometimes it is hard to tell who is who. And too often, one’s loved ones are forced to help carry this burden. Hence, even if it is but one half of a dual

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identity, I believe one must take psychoanalysis as a vocation (in Max Weber’s sense) — or else one is better off leaving it alone.

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