2014 December

“This Justifies a Life: Lanzmann’s Memoir and Yom HaShoah”
By Nathan Szajnberg, MD

To write such a book, one must live a full life. For Claude Lanzmann — Shoah’s filmmaker, Simone de Beauvoir’s lover, Sartre’s confidant — this is a memoir of several lives, all his.

And several near-deaths: as a fifteen-year old resistance fighter against the Nazis in France, ambushing SS convoys; near-drowning off Ceasaria’s Beach (feeling guilt for promises made); mad voyages at de Beauvoir’s demand; walking through a plate glass window to halt a parking citation (severing an iliac vessel); flying gliders or F16’s. Much was driven by passion, as is much of his life.
He begins with guillotines; how could one lop his head? “I have no neck….my shoulders and my aggressively defensive posture, forged gradually night after night by the nightmares that followed the primal sense of Lesurques’ death (by guillotine), which transformed (my shoulders) into a fighting bull’s morillo, neck muscles so impenetrable, the blade glances off…” (3).

He marches us through his life: a forced march, yet one taken willingly, at times breathlessly, through his mother’s childhood abandonment, his father’s refuge from Vichy. Little is gussied up; much laid bare. When he sees his mother again, years later, he yearns for her, yet within hours escapes her madness erupted in a shoe shop.
Passion pulsates through his life. When his fifteen year old sister shows up in Paris, he introduces her to the then-married Deleuze, Claude feeling ö…a helpless witness to something inevitable”: Deleuze seduces the girl, dumps her, asks Claude to tell her. When brother then introduces her to Sartre, Claude feels foreboding, even as he follows through and follows Sartre’s standard seduction/abandonment. He discusses this with de Beauvoir, who upon taking him as her “sixth man,” insists on joint vacations with Sartre, alternating dinners with him, and dinners a trois. Of de Beauvoir, he begins, “I loved the veil of her voice, her blue eyes, the purity of her face and more especially of her nostrils…” After his sister’s suicide, Lanzmann continues with Sartre and Beauvoir for some years. He admires the thinking Sartre until that thinker becomes a mockery of himself.

Most of this book tells of his life in full; only the last hundred pages begin the journey through “Shoah.” But, Lanzmann’s life explains how he could both conceptualize this …”vast choir of voices …. (who) testif(y) in a true construction of memory,” how he could dedicate over twelve years making this film. Seeking funds, when asked to write a “treatment,” he can’t comply: he needs to follow two drives: first, the stories to be told of the murdered by the living; second, his inner voice which demands “my desire would prevail …over everyone and everything.” He does not call those living, “survivors,” rather, revenants (dreamers): they are awakened by his presence and the presence of the haunted. His speakers bolt upright and face us, like the dead in Dante’s Inferno when they sense someone alive amongst them. And like those vaulted almost alive in Dante’s presence, these revenants speak their haunted dreams to us listeners, then they retreat to their living coffins of memory. Lanzmann insists for this film, “the living would be self-effacing so that the dead might speak through them…there would be no I.” In this nine hour film, Lanzmann himself is rarely glimpsed, rarely heard.

Here is a man. A man who believes in truth’s power. “…hard-heartedness…melted in the face of the work of truth.” No post-modern relativist, he does not find that histories are constructions; didn’t really happen “that way.” He gives us stories of emotional power that convince us we hear truths. We learn much from him, from his work, from his voices. This courageous man (from the root, “coeur,” heart) reveals “The question of courage and cowardice…is the scarlet thread that runs through this book..through my life” (27). Psychoanalysts might speculate that this explains why he lives so close to the precipice, as if to prove to himself his courage when he feels cowardice. But, this is between the man and his soul (and his analyst). For us, we are given stories that bring injustices to life, fight fascism in many forms, paint with words and images that reach into our own resonating souls.

In the early 1990’s, I saw Lanzmann display his blunt honesty and candor before the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society at a meeting held to screen an obscure documentary of a Nazi officer who allegedly saved the life of a fledgling medical student. The now-elderly psychoanalyst, Micheels, went to great effort to bring this European flick to New Haven. He invited Lanzmann, who screened the movie the night before our public meeting. After Micheels introduced the film and Lanzmann, we were to watch the show. Lanzmann excused himself. Said heÆd step out for a cigarette; said smoking not allowed in the building. When a senior analyst, Al Solnit, as I recall, permitted Lanzmann to cop a smoke in the auditorium during the movie, Lanzmann told us bluntly that he had seen the film once; that was more than enough. It was, in his view, psychological drivel: look at the nice tow-headed Nazi boy; his nasty too-demanding father, perhaps; the handsome young officer; how sad that he was forced to become a murder, an accomplice to butchers. Lanzmann told this gathering of analysts that such ôpsychologizingö of murderers — their unfortunate childhoods and such — embarassed our discipline and sullied the dead. Lanzmann wanted out. The audience burst into protests. One analyst stood erect, proudly declaiming that Americans believe in forming our own opinions, should watch for ourselves. Lanzmann demurred: gesturing with the unlit smoke readied between forefinger and thumb, he said go ahead and watch this; just don’t insist I have to watch it again. Because I won’t. His words seemed unabsorbed, as audience members and particularly Micheels appealed to the importance of watching this film of the fine SS officer. Lanzmann repeated his insistence: watch what you wish; I won’t watch it; call me when it is done. He stepped out to smoke (quite a few, given the length of the film). He returned for discussion. The film is unmemorable, except as intellectual pap. Lanzmann was principled as an artist, as a man. In this reviewer’s opinion, his judgement was dead on.

Throughout this book, we learn something of his creative process. Of Shoah’s editing, “…not one word of commentary…no voice- over to say what is about to happen, to tell the audience what to think, to connect one scene to the next.” The filmmaker trusts his speakers and us listeners to come to our own decisions, to think with feeling, to think hard and well. And also, to be moved (as in the sense of emotion). But, he believes that we have informed hearts. He also bristles at producers demands that he tell them plot lines and such. Rather, he takes time to mull, to sort, to sense the possibilities. Then, “The radiant solution suddenly came to me.” It is a radiant solution that he trusts.

This review’s title comes from Jean Daniel’s remark after seeing a preview of Shoah, after the nine hours of watching, an active looking and listening: “This justifies a life.” Such a remark tempts us psychoanalysts to wonder why he might feel the need to justify his life to begin with. This again, is between him and his analyst; we are not in the business of psychoanalyzing books. This bluntly honest man tell us early on, “I love life madly, love it all the more now that I am close to leaving it…” For us, letÆs be grateful that he has led this life, that he has given to us plentifully, including this memoir. Paul Celan, that tragic poet who could not tolerate living, who ended his life in the Seine after surviving the Nazis, wrote a poem of the living digging underground towards the dead. As if to touch the finger of the dead. In so doing perhaps the dead are in some way brought to life. And the living? Transformed. Lanzmann’s Shoah and now his book, Patagonian Hare transforms us.

Book Review of Reflective Network Therapy in the Preschool Years By Gilbert Kliman (Elissa Burian, Contributing Editor).  UPA PRESS, 2011, Reviewed by By Nathan Szajnberg, MD, Managing Editor.

Finally, a psychoanalyst publishes something substantive about working with very severely disturbed preschool children.  After the French psychoanalytic embarrassment revealed in the recent documentary on autism treatment in France ( Click here to read What Autism Can Teach Us About Psychoanalysis  on this website)  we need some credibility in our professions. This book gives us credibility.

Forty-five years of work with hundreds of children is trundled into this 376 page book.  Once called the Cornerstone method, it now is Reflective Network Therapy, but the method remains fundamentally the same. An analyst works within a classroom setting, conducting sessions during the class and in the class (often getting ‘input’ from other children); meeting with the teacher before and afterwards; and meeting with parents.  This is working the front lines.

I review this work at an advantage over most readers, as I have visited this preschool setting, watched Gil Kliman work with the children, the teachers and meet with the parents. Yet, much of the work will seem familiar to analysts: the intense, yet evenly-hovering presence with the child, even amidst the sometimes disorganizing chaos of a special education classroom of children. There appears to be a halo of concentrated attention, even as the analyst lies on the floor, facing a withdrawn child under a table or in a corner, or one banging the oversized Lego blocks.  It is a portrait both dedicated and humbling.

The first section covers the components and history of Reflective Network Therapy (RNT): in-classroom, individual treatment several times weekly; close collaboration with teachers weekly consultation with the parents.  Begun in the 1960’s with Marianne Kris’s supervision at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the technique was studied with support from the Foundation for Research in Preventive Psychiatry (including Solnit, Neubauer and others).  Kliman’s aim from the beginning was to assess the impact of this approach across diagnoses, including its cost and document its benefits. This is unusual for a psychoanalytic enterprise.   He documents a series of studies including comparison and control groups and outcome measures.  Among other findings, several studies have shown an increase in I.Q. averaging 24 points.  And the improvements (in IQ and other emotional measures) are dose-related: children seen four times weekly benefit more than those seen twice weekly.

Next, in addition to case histories, we have a first-person account of a formerly autistic child writing four decades after her first three-year-old meeting with Dr. Kliman. This woman’s articulate account of how she “thought” in pictures (and still does) takes its place with Temple Grandin’s moving narratives of her accommodations to her autism or the law professor, Evelyn Saks’ account of her schizophrenia and how intensive psychoanalytic psychotherapy has kept her emotionally alive.  We need more such accounts from the former patients.  Books such as August (allegedly fiction), or The Words to Say It, or the Pelican and After should become core texts for those of us in the field and more so for the public. These books are descendants of the medieval Malleus Maleficarum; intended as a guide for the courts on how witchcraft and witches exist, it is for us today a guide to how schizophrenic-like thinking was recorded — and criminalized — in that time.

Kliman recounts how this technique seems beneficial for a range of diagnoses, which while varied in DSM terms, share qualities such as disordered thinking, profound anxiety, poor self representations, difficulty to love (and be loved in return) and disruptive behaviors.  He compares the cost and outcome of the RNT approach to many others such as Lovaas’s behavioral approach (with a 40% success rate in improving IQ) or intensive individual therapy with children pulled-out of the classroom. Fonagy and Target’s honest and forthright account of the analyses of children at Hempsted showed whom psychoanalytic treatment helped and whom it didn’t (such as these kinds of children)

Kliman closes the book with a panoramic sweep of neurobiological studies to speculate about what ails these children and how various treatment approaches aid them. I leave the neuroscience for others more qualified to parse. But, we should appreciate that a psychoanalyst is willing to give an overview and to place his work in the context of evolving neuroscience.

This book takes us into the classroom with some of the most damaged children we have in our society.  The book is for psychoanalysts who want to move our thinking into the frontiers of children’s lives. But, it is also a book that should be read by those making policy, by those in education and very much by parents who are desperate for a humane approach to helping their children.

Review of Freud in Zion, by Eran Rolnik

I review Freud in Zion hesitantly, as I hope to transmit its intellectual heft, while maintaining its style of a historical thriller.

Why should I have been surprised at the scholarly yet engaging style of Rolnik, this Israeli psychoanalyst?

During my five years in Israel, I was impressed with the depth of knowledge of some of my fellow members of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, one of the  largest of the IPA component societies.  The Eitingon Institute (yes, that Eitingon, a member of the Secret Committee and a two time guest at the Wednesday meetings (its first guest from abroad), who founded and funded the Berlin Institute mostly from his family’s furrier funds, who then escaped the Nazis to found the Israel Institute over seventy-five years ago) fills its classes every year with perhaps a dozen candidates, even as an alternate Institute was founded in Tel Aviv and benefits from the Orenstein’s support.  In my years as a member and training analyst, I would hear colleagues such as Eliahu Feldman (trained in Brazil) in an hour give the clearest account of Bion I have ever heard; Yolanda Gampel, in her private study group on Klein, give a sensitive, thoughtful and carefully critical reading of the Richard case; Yoram Hazan (who died far too young) describe evenly hovering attention and apres coup (b’de’avad in Hebrew) with the accent of a knowledgable self-psychology (via Chicago’s Jim Fisch); or Emanuel Berman speak authoritatively in his rolling basso on almost any subject psychoanalytic — in Hebrew, English or Polish no less. Emanuel wrote the magnificent socio-historical study of the Israel Psychoanalytic Institute’s transformation, Impossible Education.

Why should I have been surprised at the acuity of Rolnik’s history?

Let me give some flavor of the overall themes in Rolnik’s book, to keep my comments brief, yet somehow to encourage you to read the book to understand much about not only the history of psychoanalysis in Zion, but also its cheek-by-jowl pre-history in Vienna, where Herzl and Freud lived but blocks from each other. Freud in Zion is a challenging account of how ideology can infuse psychoanalytic thinking and technique — at times for the better, at times not for the betterment of our patients.  My task is to keep my writing in the shadow of the book so that the book shines forth.

We are almost half-way through this story before psychoanalysts truly take root in the desolate soil of Zion in the 1930’s, that decade of desperation for European Jews.  Some 90,000 German Jews alone come to Israel (20% of new arrivals); Edith Jacobson is imprisoned; Richard Sterba escapes with his analysand through an office window, the S.S. on their heels; Bettelheim, not so fortunate, demobilizes his underground army, then is captured at the Czech border and becomes a guest of the S.S. in Dachau. But, Rolnik spends the first half of the book tilling the historical soil, before he sows the seeds of Freud in Zion.

Freud’s 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego was his first work translated into Hebrew (1928), reflecting the early immigrants’ sense that they needed to grasp group psychology to understand what they were doing, would be doing as strangers in this strangely unstrange land.  The early Zionists did not seem to let themselves realize that psychoanalysis’s “critical, interpretative and individual” perspective, might be at odds with the constructivist and collectivist conception, particularly amongst the kibbutzniks, that tiny portion of the population (perhaps three percent) who nevertheless grounded the ideology and became leaders of the land for decades.

In 1905, Otto Rank (nee Rosenfeld) insists that psychoanalysis could become a Jewish science. Imagine Freud’s dismay.  In contrapuntal style, Freud (1923d) insists in his talk before the B’nai Brith (the only organization outside to psychoanalysis to which he proudly belonged) that the historical fate of the Jews provided them with the capacity for free thought, willingness to fight and quest for truth — those components necessary for a psychoanalytic science (and perhaps any true discipline).

What was it about that fin-de-siecle Vienna, Rolnik asks, that seemed addicted to fatigue and convalescence — led by a monarch for many decades, whose son suicides and whose daughter-in-law travels the rails of Europe with packed steamer trunks and allegedly without wearing underwear — this center of an empire collapsing on itself, what was in the soil or air that produced psychoanalysis and Zionism?  But this turn of the century produced several disciplines that focused on the universals of nature and mankind: Einstein’s theories of the universe; socio-logie, that science of how we live together; anthropology, that thing that humankind produces called culture that seems to rule over us, and so on.  Even as the political world of Europe imploded, its intellectual life generated creative endeavors that remain with us until today, disciplines that will continue to endure.

The Russian psychoanalytic Institute had some thirty members in 1922-3, an eighth of the IPA membership!  They pursued experimental (allegedly psychoanalytic) boarding schools, which even one of Stalin’s children attended.  These Russian psychoanalysts emigrated to Germany and many ultimately to Israel, becoming nuclei for psychoanalysis.  Moshe Wulff, for instance, while a member of the Vienna Society, hailed from Russia and emigrated to Israel (to become a foil for Eitingen).

And, through Frieda (Fromm)-Reichman’s Heidelberg school, which tried to integrate psychoanalysis and  Orthodox Judaism, passed Akiva Ernst Simon (later the director of the Hebrew University School of Education), Erich Fromm, and Leo Lowenthal, later head of sociology at  UC Berkeley.  Delicious details of our early history.

Martin Buber, the philosopher who became head of sociology at the Hebrew University, opposed Freud’s ideas and ultimately the presence of psychoanalysis at the University where Freud was on the Board of Governors.  Buber seemed to fashion himself also as a developmental psychologist, postulating that everyone is born with an “originator” instinct that must be channeled by educators into communion “instinct.” It was an era when many thought they could do all: a philosopher thought he could make developmental theories and critique a discipline in which he had no training.  (A tableau of the main lobby on Mt. Scopus has all the members of the Board of Governors present at the opening of the then-barren hill listening to Magnes’ opening remarks. While Freud and Einstein were not present, the artist took liberty to paint them into the scene, a form of time travel, if you will.)

Siegfred Bernfeld (later a founder of the San Francisco Institute) was an adviser to a socialist youth movement in Israel. How involved were the early psychoanalysts in social issues of pre-State Israel?  Feigenbaum, appointed the head of psychiatry of the first hospital in Jerusalem, studied the epidemic of suicides among early settlers — some ten percent of all pioneer deaths in the second decade of the century.

The Hebrew University’s animosity towards psychoanalysis came early and endured.  But, beyond this perhaps parochial plaint, Einstein, a member of its founding Board of Governors, weighed in on the University when he wrote to discourage Eitingen from trying to find a place there (1934):

“As for the university in Jerusalem, I am sorry to say that this institution , whose importance for the entire Jewish intellectual world is so great, and whose realization I myself worked so hard for, is not exactly in good hands. I have been fighting to replace the administration for years, but have yet to see results. While I have managed to get a Committee of Inquiry convened I have little faith in the ability of the current power that be to bring about real change for the better.  So far, the university’s best have also been the ones to turn their backs on the place in bitter anger.  Why would you want to put yourself through that?”

Rolnik, a fine historian combing through letters, brings the dark corners of our history to light. Such histories make us squint in pain.  And, it is perhaps a wish that such light might cleanse.

Unfortunately, after the first Freud Chair was established in the late 1970’s (and funded mostly by American psychoanalysts, who insisted that the funds be held in New York, not Jerusalem), Joseph Sandler came but left within five years.  Anne Marie Sandler recounts that her husband said that had he been treated as well in the first four years as he was in his fifth, he might have stayed (personal communication).  Like any named Chair, a selection committee was established to review all candidates for the Chair, who are expected to be both training analysts and well-published in psychoanalysis. As best I know, this selection committee has not met in many years.

The 1930’s, that era of Schreklichkeit for European Jews, brought refugees, some reluctant, to Palestine, including Eitingen. This is the foundational beginning of psychoanalysis in Palestine.  Rolnik tells of the personalities (and the tensions) amongst these founders.  But, he presses us to think more systematically about the relationship between era and psychoanalytic theory and technique.  Rolnik says that the pre-State needs of the community tended towards collectivist thinking, optimism, highly ideological and anti-intellectual, particularly amongst the kibbutznicks.  (Shimon Peres, when asked about his hope for the future, responded that without hope there would have been no Israel. The national anthem, Hatikvah, means, “The Hope.”)  Yet, Freud’s psychoanalysis is fundamentally individualistic, non-political and imbued with a social pessimism, particular after the wholesale slaughter of World War I, after which Freud elaborated his death drive ideas.  How to resolve the tensions between these two states of mind?

Matters get more complicated; this is psychoanalysis after all.  Freud’s views of analysis arose primarily from his work with adults. Yet, psychoanalytic interest in early education arose at least with Ferenczi’s precocious 1908 paper on education.  That is, while psychoanalysis in the office is one matter, its application to early development and childhood education gives it the kind of societal optimism, a manner of applying principles to improve at least the lives of children, if not of society.  Therefore, one can see how early settlers were prepared to start kibbutzim with Marx in one fist and Freud in the other.

Rolnik states clearly his view of psychoanalysis: “…a science of subjectivity….based on universal …mechanisms.. behind.. differences and diversity….”  That is, within psychoanalysis is both what is universally deeply human and what makes us different (including the small narcissistic differences or Erikson’s pseudospeciation).

Rolnik also ventures into the early application of psychoanalysis to literary criticism, mostly a matter of what Freud called pathobiography (“reading” the author’s alleged complexes from his work).  While popular, it also raised hackles. Bialik thoughtfully zinged back:

“(psychoanalysis’s) fundamental purpose…(is to) cure the psyche….few possess…ability to enter…a writer’s secrets.. only those of great talent and transcendant purpose…”

Bialik, leaves the door ajar, but only for a select few to venture into literary dissection.

And Agnon, that Nobel prize winner who read his acceptance speech in Hebrew in Oslo, sent his wife to Eitingen for treatment. Rolnik reviews how carefully at least one of Agnon’s novels hews to Freud’s Dora case.

In his last chapter, Rolnik takes up the challenge to inquire how the political and cultural milieu affects both psychoanalytic theory and technique.  Much of his book persuasively recounts how the pre-State analysts were affected by the circumstances of this raw land  (“a land that eats its inhabitants” in the words of one of the spies sent by Moses to survey Canaan) and also how the early settlers were influenced by psychoanalysis.  In Zionist/psychoanalytic early history, there was tension between Zionism versus diaspora, like that between true and false identity. There was also the Shoah’s (“Holocaust’s”) shadow, which fostered a greater emphasis on corrective emotional experience (recovering from trauma).  The psychoanalytic price of this shift — from Freud’s emphasis on the father/law to mother(land)/fusion, the shift from primary aggression to secondary responses to traumata, from taking responsibility for the maintenance of one’s symptomatic inner life to finding the causes lying in the faults of others — has been overall to deemphasize reflecting on how one maintains one’s misery to how one can achieve a therapeutic experience to overcome the failings of others. (Laplanche might couch this as the difference between the synthetic aspects of psychotherapy versus the dissecting, analyzing aspects of psychoanalysis.)

In his brief account of contemporary Israel, his argument may falter.  He makes two observations that need not be causally related. First, he notes the impact of the Shoah, the chronic Arab-Israeli conflict (at least since the 1929 Arab riots), and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank (or Yehuda and Shomron).  He suggests that this affects how analysts think and practice.  Then, he notes that there has been a shift at least among younger analysts to the role of actual trauma, to an emphasis on the “maternal order… whose romanticism and mysticism smacks somewhat of late nineteenth-century German neo-romanticism and Gnosticism. The latter, in turn, is associated with greater interest in “primitive mental states” and a view of the individual as “passive… mostly reactive to his environment and therefore hardly accountable to his interiority and his mind.”  This sounds like Kohut’s distinction between Guilty and Tragic Man.  This is also ironic in two ways.  First, this view of humankind is diametrically opposite to the Zionist construct of building a “New Man.”  Second, it undermines Freud’s emphasis on learning how we contribute to continuing our own miseries even after we have left our parental homes.

But, Rolnik’s description of greater interest in primitive mental states and associated deemphasis of infantile sexuality and primary aggression (and taking responsibility for one’s inner life) sounds like what we see in the United States and possibly in other institutes.  Nevertheless, his attempt to connect this to the sociocultural context of Israel (Shoah/wars/occupation) will hopefully be the subject for a future work.

What Rolnik tries to do is rich and valid. If only we had more such scholarly attempts to study the evolution of psychoanalytic thinking in various societies.  Bobby Paul’s address to the IPA on culture and psychoanalysis in Chicago  is a sophisticated initial approach to this kind of study.  Kirsner’s work in Unfree Associations is another, as is Arnie Richards’ presentation on the undercurrent of Communism in early psychoanalytic members and how this affected their ideas.

That Eran Rolnik wrote this one book is enough to be proud about.  If we are fortunate, he will write more.  Buy it. Read it.

Movement – body, gesture, facial expressions – is a major component of child work.  Children move: around the office, on a chair, use the couch as a stage,  draw.  And children’s faces express increasingly complex feelings after the first year of life (Darwin, 1998; Ekman, 2003; Szajnberg, unpublished). Movement was a subject of a panel at the recent American Psychoanalytic, chaired by Karen Gilmore (APsaA, Jan 14, 2012).

Embedded in action, there is play, drawing, talk — the more representational aspect of our work.  Our task, to a significant extent, is to re-present these actions into felt words.  We are translators or transformers: we engage in the more classical physics definition of sublimation – transforming, elevating the substance from one state (movement) to higher states (mental representations, including words) by using interpretations with proper content, timing and affect.  Mayes and Cohen said of play, “An essential, daily, child analytic task is to find (and understand) the substitutes for verbal communication that will adequately convey to both child and analyst the essential nature of the child’s developmentally stagnating conflicts.” (Mayes and Cohen, 1994, p. 1235). How can we articulate a developmental model of action — movement development — comparable to our more sophisticated models of speech and language development (Shapiro, 1979; Szajnberg, 1985)?

Klein and Anna Freud, despite profound differences, recognized that children’s play and drawing function as free association, create a setting comparable to adult analysis, with proper “listening” technique by the analyst, (Klein, 1984; Sandler, Kennedy, Tyson, 1980), even as the role of play was multiply redefined, such as the balance between play and interpretation (Downey, 1987).  We can say more about this “listening” technique in child work.  We move, occasionally in response to the child: a change in facial expression (e.g. sadness, surprise, joy), or a gesture, or body shift or movement, or muscle tension/relaxation.  Children watch, even when they appear not to listen.

Little written about the child’s movement evoking analyst’s countermovement.  Glenn’s Child Analysis and Therapy (1978) does not discuss child movement, let alone the analyst’s in detail.   Sugarman (2009) argues that child analytic process is like adult process, briefly alluding to “technical differences” (Fraiberg, 1967) , without discussing the vis-à-vis setting and movement . This paucity exists despite Hoffer’s thoughtful elaboration on Freud’s concept that our first ego is a body ego (Hoffer, 1950).  In contrast, adult psychoanalytic literature has pioneered work on body posture (Reich, 1934) and gesture (Jacobs, 1973; Ogden, 2000), including recent work on the physicality and embodiment of speech (Pinsky, 2008; Vivona, 2010).  Anthony (1977, 1982) accented the importance of the “sessile position” in child analytic work (trying to stay in one’s chair), yet sensitively does not preclude the analyst’s initiating movement and gesture when working with a silent child.

Infancy researchers also have elaborated the communicative nature of child movement prior to syntactical speech.  Piaget (Piaget, 1952) described the sensorimotor stage as a phase in which knowledge lives in our bodies; a child shows he understands the concept “behind” well before he has the words to say it.  Ainsworth, following Bowlby, uses the child’s locomotion to understand the child’s working model of attachment (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, and Wall 1978).  The Strange Situation a child “tells” us through movement about its mother’s sensitivity in the first year of life.  Other examples include Spitz’s observation of the evoked social smile or pre-semantic “No,” (Spitz, 1959); Winnicott’s (1975) spatula (tongue depressor) play; Kestenberg’s esoteric studies of infant tension-flow, elaborating Labanotation (Kestenberg and Sossin, 1979); Beebe and colleagues’ applying movement from mother-infant to adult analysis (Beebe, et. al., 2005); and Stern’s elegant discoveries of attunement or movement memory in infants (Stern, 1985, 2004).

Here, I initiate a discussion and study of the analyst’s responsive movements – countermovement’s – an embodied aspect of countertransference.  Articulating our countermovements may initiate greater awareness and systematization for training and treatment. We have in mind as a model what Shapiro (1979) suggested in Clinical Psycholinguistics’ final chapter:  adults (including therapists), without consciousness, modify syntax and vocabulary depending on the child’s development age. The adult analytic literature about the analysand’s body experiences on the couch is rich, ranging from what is experienced at erogenous zones (where mucosa meets the outside world) (Freud, 1901) to how we hold (or “armor”) our bodies (Reich, 1934; Deutsch, 1947, 1952) to a vast literature on movement and gesture (Breuer and Freud, 1895), including noting the analysand’s facial expression (Freud, 1901). Only in the last few decades has the adult literature explored and articulated how the analyst responds bodily to material (Jacobs, 1994; Beebe, et. al. 2005; Knoblauch, 2009), although Fenichel (1953) suggested that the analyst’s expressive movements facilitate empathy.  Here, we discuss analyst movement in the vis-à-vis of child treatment.

Clinical vignettes describe different categories of countermovements in child work. This will be familiar to those working with children , but will include examples of both “present moment” confirmation or facilitation of process, and more content-oriented exploration of meaning.

Facilitating the connection

In some of the following vignettes, the analyst became aware of the movement only after the fact.  In the first case, a diagnostic interview, an observant student  asked afterwards why the analyst moved in certain ways at specific moments.

“Shoshi”  a six-year old, was drawing a little girl.  She explained:  the girl didn’t like to be looked at by the sun, whom she then darkened.  She began drawing bent slightly over the paper, then rested her head on her left arm as she drew with her right, tongue tip between her lips, concentrating. The analyst realized later that when she began drawing, he sat forward in his chair, almost matching her angle of pose above the paper; then, when she became more engaged in the drawing and rested her head on her arm, the analyst reposed (on reflection, giving her space).  But, when she turned one quarter towards him to tell him that the little girl was shy of the sun looking at her, she leaned slightly (perhaps ten degrees) away; the analyst responded with a tilt (not consciously at the moment) in the opposite direction. As she continued her story, the child leaned towards the analyst, finally touching his left shoulder with her right. Again, in retrospect (after the student asked about this pas de deux), did the analyst realize that as the child leaned towards him, he relaxed his previous tilt away, sitting up until she leaned into him, and finally turned vis-à-vis to finish her story.

For the moment, let us consider these countermovements a response both to the child’s movement and her expressed story; the countermovement’s function was to facilitate the child’s comfort, but also (and via) an attunement to her gestural and postural affect

Tapping lightly

Uri, a six-year old boy, had difficulty engaging in the work.  He spoke little and when offered a crayon and paper to draw, he sat with the crayon poised above the paper, a mournful cast on his face and whispered into empty space, “ I don’t know how to draw … even a person.” The analyst wordlessly picked up a red crayon and began lightly tapping the paper while glancing sideways at the boy . The tapping produced light dots. The boy looked, then began drawing a story of a boy in his apartment, where his father had a big basement coop for chickens and birds and ducks. This torrent of words complemented the drawing.  He elaborated: there was straw on the floor for the birds to build nests. There were different coops so that animals didn’t attack each other. The boy in the story liked helping his father, especially feeding the animals. The coops were several times larger than the boy’s apartment.

Here, the analyst’s approach, following Winnicott’s Squiggle game (1971), was to facilitate the boy’s physical (drawing) communication.  Unlike Winnicott, the analyst does not draw and tell a story, as the boy picked up the initiative without further intervention by the analyst.[2] The analyst’s movements were not in response to specific content, but in response to a laconic, apparently uncomfortable child.   The analyst did not match the movement’s recalcitrance, rather he fostered an engagement in curiosity, tapping into an inherent felt story wanting to be told.

Swinging Light

“Henry” a four and one half year old in the waiting room with his father for his first visit looks frightened as the analyst enters, squats and welcomes the boy.  Henry grabs his father’s arm in terror and tries to drag him out of the chair to the exit.  The analyst points outside the window well to his goldfish pond.  Henry pauses, sees the fish food and flashlight on the window ledge and watches fish rise to the surface as the analyst offers a pinch of food. The flashlight grabs Henry‘s attention. The analyst picks up the light by its lanyard, turns it on and begins swinging it slowly, pendulously so that its beam sweeps parallel to the oak floorboards, towards and away from the consulting room. The boy watches, head swiveling with the light, then reaches for the lanyard, hand-on-hand, imitating the analyst. After several moments, the analyst rises and walks to the office. The boy, carrying the flashlight, follows. Body-to-body, then attack

For several months, Henry’s play consists of hiding and finding glass marbles or violent playhouse play consisting of a super baby who launches from the basement, his head smashing through the floors, then the roof, then falling back head first, crashing the roof and the house.  Attacks on the baby’s head were a recurrent theme.  This baby/house story was punctuated by his running in counterclockwise circles while flapping his hands and repeatedly, excitedly reciting tales of the baby’s head smashing.

In a parent meeting, without revealing details of the clinical work, I described this boy’s concern about body integrity. Afterwards, mother asked to meet alone.  She insisted that I not reveal to her husband what she had never told anyone.  Henry was her only child.  She found him a difficult infant, and became increasingly angry at him.  She chose to stay home the first year and regretted the decision.  Because of him, she wanted no more children.  One day, at sixteen months, she was ascending a spiral staircase holding her son, who was crying inconsolably, both pushing away from her and grabbing her neck.  She reached the top of the stairs and flung him across the floor against the cupboards. He sustained a scalp wound, bleeding profusely. She brought him to the Emergency Room, explaining that he had fallen down the stairs. After stitches and overnight observation, he returned home without evident medical sequelae. She feared her own anger at the boy and retained a live-in caretaker thereafter.  She said, in contrast, that her two younger nieces were “angels.”   She thought her son had something wrong with his brain, that he was so difficult a child, one who needed treatment.   I do not claim that this specific event was “remembered” by the boy; yet, his recurrent play had the quality of trauma play (Terr, 1994), and he likely absorbed his mother’s feeling of her antagonism towards him.  There is history for both discrete and cumulative trauma (Khan, 1974).  He certainly knew that mother favored his nieces, commenting repeatedly on this in session.

Over the second year of treatment, Henry cautiously, progressively approached me.  While drawing, he sidled closer. As he told me stories, he looked at me directly. One day, nearing the end of a session, he climbed onto my lap. He took the pencil, with which he had been drawing, and placed its tip gently between my lips. He said this was “milky” and I should drink it.  I obliged.   He then rested his head on my left shoulder, holding the pencil in his right hand on my lips and observing closely.  I found myself softening, reclining with some sense of comfort that this child was at rest in my arms.  Suddenly, with his left palm, he slammed the pencil into my mouth, striking the back of my throat.  Shocked, I jerked my head back and yanked out the pencil.  He leaped off my lap with a look of terror.  After moments to collect myself, I said something along these lines: he was showing me that even when something good was happening, he expects to be hurt.  This theme now entered and recurred in his dollhouse play over the next months: the baby, a super baby, feeding others, doing super power things, then suddenly rocketing through floors and the roof, then crashing down destroying things with its head. With time, the interpretation began to take hold; anxiety diminished and the head-smashing play was replaced with less body-destructive play.  That is, here my countermovements (my relaxation, then my sudden jerk away and subsequent body caution) lent themselves to interpret content of a possibly re-enacted experience.

Being Directed by the Child

“Lily” began treatment at five. She brought suitcases with clothes and costumes to perform various song and dance routines. Later, she brought her boom box to accompany her.  She became super-heroes, girls with bodily powers such as erupting volcanically, or shocking electrically, or stretching elastically.  She assigned roles to me: being an incompetent boy, or a teenage sitter who never could do his job well.  In one extended play over several months, I was to be the baby-sitting teenage brother, who dozed off when he should have been watching over his baby sister (her). She directed me elaborately. She would turn down the floor lamp’s dimmer, telling me to get sleepier and sleepier. Then, I was to awaken with terror as she recited to me the nightmare I was having (Szajnberg, 2010).  (Months later, she revealed that she had had this recurrent nightmare for some time, but since beginning our play, it had gone away.)  She observed me well: if I did not show enough fear or surprise in my face or gesture, she insisted we start over until I got it right.  She tolerated no “faking it” on my part.  Her direction of my emotive expression extended into other areas of the work as it continued for the next three years. She was a Stanislavsky method director.  She expected me to “match” her inner sense of how “it” (various experiences) felt. If I was “off,” she corrected me crisply.

Noticing one’s physical reactions.

“Sonia” decided that rather than singing and dancing on the floor, the couch was a better stage. Perched high, she went through various routines she had seen on TV.  In fact, this was entertaining.  But, as she became more enthusiastic, she started using the analytic couch — a Mies van de Rohe, black Napa leather day bed with round bolster — as a trampoline for gymnastic routines. As the bolster would interfere with her routines, she removed it at the beginning of session.  Only after a bit, I noticed a sense of tension in my abdominal muscles, then rising irritation with her. (I also noticed after such a session that the leather-wrapped buttons were loosening.)   Finally, I recognized that I was more concerned about the well-being of my couch than the content of her session.  I told her that she could not do gymnastics on the couch, nor dismantle it for her routines. Her performances continued in a more grounded manner with greater comfort on my part.  That is, what father considered “games,” were experienced by her as both seductively exciting and attacks on her body, just as the analyst was “seduced” by her performances, while at the same time, angry at her attacks on his fancy couch.

Sonia‘s reaction was quite matter-of-fact. She resumed her performances on the floor with little ado, although the analyst had hesitated for months, concerned that he would be circumscribing her work.  We can understand her reaction in terms of Winnicott’s idea of an honest, yet contained expression of honest hatred in the analyst’s response: if the patient is pulling for this expression and the analyst can metabolize this and present it in a straightforward, yet restrained manner, the patient trusts in the work more deeply (Winnicott, 1974; Giovacchini, 2000).  Here the comment by the analyst, that is the putting into the words the building bodily tension, facilitated the working alliance. It could also have been expressed in terms of a re-enactment of the child’s sense of hatred elicited in her father, which he expressed by engaging her in “games” that were highly sexualized. This was explored later in the treatment.

Discussion

Early in my training, I naively asked a supervisor who was renown for his child work, how he got children to use the couch. He responded that with children he insisted only that they stay off the ceiling.

We expect children to move in treatment: it is not only developmentally-appropriate, but also how they tell their (life) stories. But, how do we move in response to children, not only whole body movement, but also gesture, facial expression and our physical responses to material?  Anthony suggested in his “sessile position” paper that optimally, over time, the child analyst should be able to remain seated.  This fits with the sense that we have greater observing ego available at rest.  Movement makes demands on our experiencing ego, at times diminishing the observing ego’s acuity.  Yet, children do not always permit us this leisure. The child therapist’s task is to avail himself or herself of whatever observing ego can be called up even as our body is in motion, as our experiencing egos are engaged.  Fortunately, there is a continuum from experiencing to observing ego.  In this sense, child treatment is more demanding of our observing ego than work with adults on the couch: we are not watched and adults move less.

I concentrate on moving response, countermovements; something that hews closer to the concept of countertransference as it has been developed and expanded since Racker’s (1957) early article, to include our feelings evoked in response to the analysand’s non-verbal communications.   “Countermovement” captures a continuum of meaning from the more descriptive (literally, the analyst’s movement in response to the child); to the preconscious movements closer to procedural knowledge or related to the phenomena of mirror neurons; to the more classically unconscious countertransference (the range of analyst’s  repressed feelings underlying the manifest movement, that range from feelings that “counter” the analysand’s transference to those that are enactments that may facilitate the work.).  Consider how to categorize different types of countermovements.  On occasion, this is analogous to affect attunement (a matching of body affect); on other occasions, the analyst hewes closer to Winnicott’s Squiggle game (op. cit.), offering the hope of a dialogue in play (the boy with the crayon frozen mid-air).

For instance, the vignettes of the Shoshi, or Uri boy, or light-swinging boy suggest the analyst’s movement in response to the child’s expressed movement: the shift away, then towards by the girl; the boy’s frozen hesitance, crayon poised in the air; Henry’s fear about leaving his father or entering the office.  On reflection, the analyst realized that he responded physically, wordlessly, to facilitate the work, to make the setting less threatening, more comfortable.

Second, the extended vignette of Henry “bottle-feeding” the analyst with a pencil comes closer to our current understanding of non-verbal expression of inner life enactment, which evoke feelings in the analyst (Giovacchini, 2000; Ogden, 2005).  This boy may have memory traces of his mother flinging him across the floor, or head smashing, or at least her ongoing resentment of him and expressed belief that his brain was damaged (from birth).  His pencil “play” expressed severe ambivalence: on the one hand, he wishes/feels/imagines coming to repose on someone, being fed; on the other hand, he expects “unanticipated” stabbing attacks.  The paranoid anxiety comes in the “arms” so to speak of someone who should be comforting him; his look of terror as he leaped off my lap captures visually his expectation of retaliation (and possibly horror/guilt of what he had done) (Klein, 1975). The analyst’s task is to transform the movements (both child’s and his) into symbolic representation including the projected fears and wishes.

Third, and more complex perhaps, is Lily’s theatrical direction of my performance — including that my voice and face express clearly the feelings she wanted me to display: this involves both conscious (her close observation of me and directorial demands) and unconscious (repeating her life experiences, for instance, of how she felt so controlled by her parents; had to put on a good face). This is but one example of many: because we are vis-à-vis, the child can monitor more closely our expressed emotions. Further, because spontaneous emotions are expressed facially (and physiologically) before we become conscious of the emotion (Ekman 2005; Szajnberg, 2010), the child can literally see more transparently the sincerity of the analyst’s emotions. We are on display.

The final example — couch as trampoline — shows a stepwise response to evoked feelings. First the analyst became aware of tightening in his belly, then aware of diffuse irritation that became focused on the child, then aware of being preoccupied with his couch’s survival.  Only after this bubbling up of feelings into consciousness did the analyst realize that this child’s entertaining displays had become an irritation to him and “endangered” the integrity of the analytic couch, an extension of his body (certainly of his identity).  This dawning awareness may be a characteristic of countertransference with more primitive mental states (Flarsheim, 1975).  After months, the child revealed her uncle’s seductive attacking “games”: then the analyst realized her re-enactment as aggressor on the analyst’s body proxy.

These examples of countermovements are not exhaustive. Hopefully, they will elicit further thought and discussion on the range and nature of the analyst’s movements in response to child material and movement.

Movement is complex.  It ranges from within body feelings (muscle tightening, relaxing, twitching), to body movement, gesture and facial expression (Jacobs, 1973; 1994; Beebe, et. al., 2005).  There are various influences on movement. Culture (and child-rearing that transmits culture (Erikson, 1950)) can express itself in different body orientations: in dance, for instance, movement style may range from the low-to-the-ground, en bloc dance of Athabascan Indians, to the more sinuous fluidity of Indonesian dance, to the stylized upper body, foot-slapping lower body Kathakali dance of Southern India (Lomax, Bartenieff, Pauley, 1968).  Gender differentiation in movement may show itself in children as young as three (Birdwhistle, 1968).  Cognition is held in the body (Piaget, 1952), as are aspects of self-representation in the first three phases of self development (Stern, 1985).  For both Piaget and Stern earlier developmental states do not disappear, but remain as levels underlying later stages: what starts in the body, stays in the body.  Finally, in addition to discrete affects (such as happy, sad, angry, fear, contempt, disgust), which are expressed universally, we also have the vitality affects (Stern, 1985, 2003), which characterize an individual, even a culture. One might view vitality affects — such as enthusiasm, zest, languor, sobriety, frenetic, calm — as a body version of character.

Stern’s Present Moment concentrates on verbalizations of these experiences, making them also shared experiences. Briefly, his clinical examples are based on his microanalytic interview, which assesses five seconds of experience and graphs this on a timeline with vertical axis of event/feeling/sensation/thought/affect/action . This is highly verbal, but much of its foundation stems from his observations of the ballet between mother and infant.  This paper asks us to extend this “present moment” concept to child work.  Stern makes a crisp distinction between seeking meaning in psychoanalysis versus his emphasis on (shared) “life verisimilitude.”  In this paper, we suggest a continuum between these poles.  He argues that “…psychoanalysis is interested in the relationship between pieces of the current experience, past experiences and preformed structures that forge meaningful patterns.  The timing between those pieces … is important for psychoanalysis, but not the timing within the individual pieces, especially the present.” (p. 139) He continues later, “…in most psychodynamic treatments, there is a rush toward meaning, leaving he present moment behind. We forget that there is a difference between meaning…and experiencing something more and more deeply.” ((p. 140). Of course, in psychoanalytic work, with an emphasis on the transference, Freud recognized that meaning and experiencing it more deeply need be annealed (Freud, 1905).   Stern emphasizes that there is a “problematic relationship between a lived experience…and its later linguistic (re)construction,” something he presented as early as his discussion of the development of selves in childhood and the gap between the first three aspects of self and the linguistic self that develops after the third year (Stern, 1985).  He concludes, “the experience of the present moment…aims for life verisimilitude, not meaning.” (p. 141)

View the analyst’s countermovements in response to various aspects of the child’s work; there is a continuum between this experienced verisimilitude (the sense in affect attunement, for instance, when a baby feels, “Yes, you’ve got what I am feeling; you share it.”) and the deeper sense of meaning that comes with meaningful understanding that is infused with feeling.

The analyst’s responsibility is not only to recognize one’s movements, but more so, to distinguish when our movements are in response to the child’s material; a form of bodily countertransference.  The analyst’s body ego (Hoffer, 1950) may “dance” with child material.  This is not only Stern’s attunement (1985), but also engages our body more fully. The analyst has a responsibility in his self-analysis to know his body, feel it, recognize his movements in order to know when the movements are his own versus his countermovement to the child’s work, the child’s attempt to express something without the words to say it.  In a very specific sense, we simply extend Freud’s idea of evenly hovering attention to include not only what we hear, but also how we feel and move in response to the analysand’s associations.

One final point.  In most of the vignettes, the analyst became aware of his body movements often after the fact. This “after the fact” sense shares a quality with Nachtraglichkeit, après coup.  That is, only after an experience, when there is a following “experience” with greater cognitive capacity or awareness, does the first experience become noticed and understood; there may be more material to infuse greater understanding; there may be more room for the analyst’s balance of observing versus experiencing.  This extends Freud’s concept of Nachtraglichkeit, hewing closer to the French development of après coup (LaPlanche, 1999; Birksted-Breen, 2003; Perleberg, 2006).   Here, the sense of après coup applies to the analyst’s mental processes making sense of the prior emerging experiences.

Children live closely to their body experiences.  In our work with children, we appreciate and meet the challenge to elevate body experience — in this case, movement (our own and theirs)– into symbolic representation, into finding the meaning in our lives as expressed in our bodies.  We learn the prosodic dance beneath the words; like music to lyrics, they can be linked.

My first “Denting” piece looked at the internal ingredients in Steve Jobs that nourished his ingenuity; I focused on his feeling a “chosen” child because of his adoption. Touchingly, one colleague (Dr. Franieck) wrote that the adult Steve, — given away at birth and adopted into a wonderful home — could place the better parts of himself in a multitude of homes (and hands) as an Apple, an iPod, an iPhone, an iPad. Apple “adopters” looked forward enthusiastically to the annual announcements by Jobs of the latest product to enter their homes. Jobs even brought Woody and Buzz Lightyear into the hearts of children (and a few adults) with “Toy Story” as the abandoned characters struggled to find their way back home to their boy, Andy. When we cradle and admire and depend upon the elegantly, zen-simple iPhone, we hold a good, perhaps the better part of Jobs.

Today, I ask what we might learn from what Jobs considered his most important creation: the Apple institution, the people whom he assembled to imagine, then create the future, to put tools in our hands to advance our lives, as he put it. Look at the Apple Jobs built; play with the possibility that we might learn about our psychoanalytic institutions: our institutes, our organizations. How much can we learn from this business about our psychoanalytic enterprise?

This is a stretch, an exercise, for certainly we know that we can’t compare Apples and (psychoanalytic) Oranges. Except insofar as they both can be fruitful.

Listen to some of Jobs’ words, but listen as if we were trying them out for analytic institutions. (all citations from Isaacson’s biography)

“Make something that you believe in…that lasts” (78).

“Products have an essence…a purpose for which they are made… (it) desires to fulfill its essence.” ( 285).

“… progress by eliminating…removing the superfluous.” (445)

“(focus on) what could mess us up” (465)

He even addresses aggression, when he considers Aikido as a model for work: harnessing the other’s aggression in one’s favor, without harming the other (504).

When asked what drove him, he responded: to use his talents to express deep feelings, appreciate the contributions of his precedents and to add to that flow of progress. Reasonable ideas for an analysis even.

Jobs defined Apple, the institution as a setting focused on imagination: nurturing, applying and executing it.

Jobs was also blunt with his staff: he considered them the “A” team players. Anyone who was “B” team could work elsewhere in the Silicon Valley. (Many did.) We can hear this is as elitist or terribly demanding. Yet, if we think of the New York City Ballet, or the Met, or the NY Philharmonic, or Paul Taylor, those of us who enjoy their work expect the finest of performers: we are not likely to refer to the artists as “elitist” nor of the directors as terribly demanding … even though, strictly speaking, they can be seen this way. (And how many of us in NYC would enter a restaurant with a “B” rating for cleanliness?)

The Jobs biography described many employees and former employees who described the mixed sense of working at Apple, working for Jobs: both frightfully exhausting and exhilarating, both the most demanding times of their lives and the most exciting.

Jobs treasured ad writers. Yet, after Jobs once rejected several possible ad campaigns, his writers asked in frustration, “What do you want?” To which Jobs responded that he didn’t know yet, but would know when he saw it.

Jobs told a team of engineers to come up with a design repair within twenty-four hours for a product’s debut; they insist, “Impossible.” Jobs responds, “Possible.” They leave, work through the night, invent a solution, return to his office the next day saying that they still believe that this was impossible, but somehow they did it.

Now, I ask that we listen to this as if we could apply this to our institutions of psychoanalysis. Let’s try this, a form of playing with possibilities in our minds. And, we can also decide that Jobs’ Apple may be good for some psychoanalytic institutions; there are other Silicon Valley companies, or Dells, and Microsofts, IBMs and Toshibas that are run differently, may serve different functions. After all, Apple represents perhaps five percent of the market in computers sold. (But, ironically, Apple pulled in thirty-five percent of computer revenues on their five-percent market: no discounts on Apple.) That is, we can decide on what kind of institution we want to build and inhabit, then do so.

Consider some parallels between Apple and our enterprise, two very different institutions. What can they share?

First, Jobs says Apple predicts the future by inventing it. Psychoanalysis helps the analysand invent a future based on his present and past and restructuring these. This is related to Loewald’s perhaps controversial idea that the analyst has some sense that the analysand’s future can be something better than what is, even if we don’t know the specifics of that future. Or, a related idea from Alfred Flarsheim (an analysand of Winnicott) is the analyst cares perhaps more for the potential within the analysand than for the (suffering) analysand in the present. (One can also care for both.)

Second, and related to the first, is Jobs’ insistence that he didn’t know exactly what would be right, but would know it when he saw it. And he expected his team to come up with the solutions. Jobs was more a conductor rather than a musician: they could make the music; his task was to have a sense of how it should sound, its essence, then how to conduct. So too, we may not know precisely what are the analysand’s solutions or resolutions; we do know when we hear it, as will the analysand. Again, this is closer to Freud’s concept of analyst as midwife.

Third, Jobs’ idea that simplicity is elegant, sublime, sophisticated. Pare away the unnecessary; focus on what matters; eliminate the unimportant. Analytic work is closer to sculpting than to painting (a layering-on): we chip (carefully, so as not to fracture, so as not to hit a vulnerable vein beneath the marble’s surface) chip away, as Michelangelo said, to reveal the sculpture lying within the stone. And, even the discarded chips and dust have value and meaning, as a student explained to me. Here we can think of both consulting room and organization. How often in our offices we listen, and listen again and once more, to know whether, and when and what to say: to select from the myriad of material? For our organization: how can we pare down our identity to simple elegance, focus our efforts, not dissipate our energies?

I continue only with a few more, perhaps more controversial ideas from Apple for psychoanalysis.

Jobs remarked about new products: “(there) falls a shadow between conception and creation.” (p 98). Something is kindled in our offices; then comes the arduous efforts to bring this to creation, to manifest this as a better life. This hies to Freud’s idea that the difference between an idea and a paper is the difference between an affair and a marriage. For the latter, once must work and maintain that work through the fog and shadows that will fall over our efforts.

His idea that products have an essence and a desire to fulfill its essence is perhaps a romantic concept, but one that we can consider for psychoanalytic work. And the idea of the desire to fulfill essence and the shadows that fall are parallel to the concepts that there is a healthy maturational drive in our analysands, and reactions of negativity that will impede our efforts. So too in our organization: we need recognize both an essence of what we are about and to be and the shadowy group processes that impede development.

As for Aikido, not a bad model for handling, refining, redirecting aggression so that it does not harm the analysand and in fact the analysand can harness it to his or her better ends. Aikido also not a bad model for psychoanalytic organizations: rather than directing aggression towards each other, or towards external enemies, find ways to shift it into, let’s say, creative assertion, forcefulness, healthy certitude.

I close with one of Jobs more controversial comments: standing before his employees and calling them the “A” team. This wasn’t empty cant, wasn’t empty boosterism: Jobs was not that. He insisted that Apple make the best possible product, one that would empower humankind. Jobs wasn’t being nice to his team, he was being blunt. He also recognize the greater capacities within his employees than even they knew at the moment: like a coach, he could set goals just above what the athlete feels s/he can perform.

Can we possibly apply this to psychoanalysis? In the office, we expect this of ourselves: we need be the best possible clinician we can be. (That may not be “A” team, but let’s start with this.) Certainly those of us who enter analysis have a right to expect that our analysts will work at their best. Few would elect mediocre analysts. (Those who would should have their heads examined.) Just as it may be unfair that only the finest dancers can join the Balanchine’s ballet company. Dare we apply this to our organization? Can we expect that psychoanalytic organizations are “A” teamers? Do our analysands, our candidates, our society have a right to expect us to be “A” teamers?

This is a charged question, but one that Jobs’ life and creation, Apple, permits us to consider.

I close with an unusual ad for Apple, approved by Jobs, voiced over by Richard Dreyfuss:

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in square holes, the ones who see things differently. They are not fond of rules.. no respect for status quo. You can quote…disagree..glorify…or vilify them… You can’t ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward.” (italics added).

Early psychoanalysts were rebels (Freud and his sex stuff), troublemakers (not just sex, but parapraxes, even dreams reveal something about ourselves); they saw the world differently. From the beginning until today, analysts have been disagreed with, even vilified (see the NYR Books’ English professor’s screed against Freud). We can change “things,” mostly people’s inner lives for the better. We may even be able in very modest, small ways “push the human race forward,” if we think in the Talmudic sense of saving a single life is saving the world.

But, sadly, in fact we are rather ignored.

If we consider what Jobs truly built, the organization that invented futures, empowered humankind, we may be able to redesign a psychoanalytic organization that is not ignored, that will find and give more meaning to our world.

The next few weeks’ columns have three aims. First, to cull the ingredients of a kind of genius, ingenuity found in Steve Jobs.  Second, to open possibilities about how we can think about our psychoanalytic work from how Jobs and Apple thought about their creativity, design and the making of elegance.  Third, to explore Apple as an institution: one that’s made a dent in the universe; invented the future; read our desires often before we were aware of them; nurtured, applied and executed imagination; and (paraphrasing his wife) empowered, advanced and put tools in the hands of humankind.  What can psychoanalytic institutions learn about institutions that excel, that change our lives for the better, a cardinal feature of psychoanalysis?  This column’s brevity can but further thought and discussion.  The three topics will be covered in a series of weekly columns.

Walter Isaacson started his biography, “Steve Jobs,” (which I review and quote here) at the dying Jobs’ invitation.  Jobs gave  Isaacson full access: former lovers, friends and enemies, collaborators and competitors (such as Bill Gates and others).  Jobs asked only for input on the cover photo, which he chose on his deathbed.

Apple products, in which Jobs was involved in stunning detail, not only reflect aspects of the man (and the team he constructed), but also have changed our world for the better, has excelled beyond most other related high-tech competitors. That makes our task —  studying ingenuity — easier: we can learn about the man’s genius from his products.   He was intimately, avidly, even obsessively involved in every detail of every product, even its packaging, even its advertising, such as the 1984 “anti-1984” award-winning TV ad in which a women athlete smashes the screen of the Big Brother talking head   CLICK HERE  TO WATCH AD .

And I am an Apple devotee: in 1996, as Medical Director of the San Francisco Family Mosaic Project, with a staff of about two dozen, we had an almost full-time I.T. person to keep my City-sanctioned C…q computer and our other PC’s alimping. When I asked what it was like for her to care for her own computer, she responded, “I  have a Mac; no patience for all the crashes and tech problems with these PC when I’m home.”  I junked my C…q (It junked itself; I came only to bury, not praise it.) and bought a Mac. When I brought my Mac to one of the first Apple stores (Palo Alto), while waiting at the Genius Bar, a friendly fellow introduced himself and raved about his Mac: David Packard (Yes, as in Hewlitt-Packard) effused about the four other Macs he had at home, adding with a wink that HP still made good printers.  I learned recently from Apple that I’ve bought forty products since then (a good number are iPod shuffles).

This is not a psychobiography.  There are few geniuses who’ve done good psychobiography; Erikson in particular, but Robert Coles, Ostwald on Glenn Gould and Freud’s Schreber also qualify. As psychoanalysts, our usual material is the process in the office; we are careful not to jump to judgements about our psychoanalysands. In our offices, our analysands respond to, correct, modify our interpretations: a dialogue proceeds with editing and revisions that result in a most plausible life history.  Not so in many psychobiographies; books can’t dialogue.  Yet, many psychobiographies are cavalier about drawing conclusions from written or historical material.

Rather, I will suggest that we plumb Isaacson’s book to learn what we can about the ingredients for genius and ingenuity, the drive for perfection, simplicity and beauty, to make a “dent in the Universe,’’ in Jobs’ words.  At times, the descriptions of Jobs, including calling himself an “asshole,” will be harsh. At times, readers may want to use diagnostic terms to categorize Jobs. Hold judgment; in fact, let us not judge at all, but learn.

Bare bones background.  Jobs was born to two Midwest University students and given up for adoption, provided he be placed with college graduates. When the prospective adoptive couple learned it was a boy, they backed off.  Jobs was shipped to the next waiting couple in California, a working class husband and wife, the father known for his refurbishing cars (and doing fine mechanical work for the defense industry).  The twenty-three year old birth mother, on learning of this, tried to retract.  A desperate negotiation followed: the adoptive parents would put aside funds for college.  Jobs knew that his father bought, refurbished and sold junkers, to salt away dough for his college.  The garage … that same garage where the teens Wozniak and Jobs built their first computer … was dad’s workshop: a magical, immaculate, orderly kingdom of repair, rejuvenation, exactitude.  An earlier Silicon Valley garage had given birth to Hewlitt-Packard.  Years later, at Reed College, Jobs dropped out after a few weeks, in part, he said, because he knew how much his parents were paying for this education and felt guilty.  He hung around campus for some months, permitted to audit courses, especially one on typography which influenced his choice in the typefaces in which you see this written.  I leave it to the interested reader to learn more about his early life, except to return below to address how he always considered himself “chosen” by his adoptive family and adored both parents; he virtually worshiped his father, even when Jobs was about fifteen and realized that he understood something about engineering that his father didn’t get.

Jobs’ creations reflected his inner life.  Look at his innovative products Isaacson lists to capture the qualities of this man: iMac (desktop publishing and graphics interface); iPod (thousands of songs in one’s palm); Toy Story/Pixar (the playful, childlike nexus of digital imagination); Apple Stores (defining a brand associated with elegance and simplicity); iTunes (resuscitating the music industry); iPhone (shifting all this into a phone: music, photos, videos, email, the Web); Apps (a new content industry); iPad (platform publishing and video) iCloud (seamless syncing of devices); and over all this, Apple: a company that meshed art with technology to unleash the imagination of its workers and customers.

Here’s how others described Jobs, those who knew him well. He was “a naif toyed with by the angels,” passionate and sensitive; callous and sentimental; inspiring and flawed.  He had laser-like focus, a unique kind of empathy (for the technical and aesthetic needs of others), perfectionist, petulant and prickly. He loved the ascetic and elegant, minimalist and pure.  He could be firm and confident (some competitors called this arrogant).  He had passion, intensity, was attuned to the nuances of the environment.  He engaged in deep collaboration; valued aesthetically the austere that could be fondled; believed thinner is better.

Jobs’ three Apple principles are: 1) eliminate the unimportant; 2) impute the desired (packaging should anticipate the beauty, elegance, competence within); 3) and simplify (simplicity equals sophistication).  Zen gardens he appreciated; a Zen sensibility he brought to what he desired, then created.  When asked about work at Apple, he said, it’s not a job, but a life.

Our focus here is what ingredients fostered this unique kind of genius.  Some character traits may be present that may not contribute to the nature of his genius: he called himself an asshole, others said he could be coldly cruel, but we, as psychoanalysts, need parse, weigh, ask if these character ingredients contributed to the creative process.

Beginning with Wozniak, he associated and later recruited stunningly bright people to collaborate with him. He was demanding, yet made his better decisions when those around him challenged (sometimes respectfully, not always), showing a dedication to the aesthetics, the potential within the product at hand (rather than personal aggrandizement or personal attack). He insisted that a product was fulfilling an essence not yet realized (an echo of Plato’s idea that objects try to achieve an ideal existing in the universe, or at least the artisan’s mind.)  He insisted: the way to predict the future is to invent it.  He looked down upon Bill Gates because Microsoft was a copier of things, an assembler, made mediocre products that were (almost) good enough, showed little aesthetic sense.  One great battle between Jobs and other high tech companies (particularly Gates’ Microsoft) was Jobs’ insistence that a product be fully internally integrated, be self-sufficient, could not be tampered with by others.  Gates posed this as the battle between “open” systems (with its cultural code of “open” being “good,” more “democratic”) versus “closed” systems. I suggest we frame this differently:  taking care of the whole matter at hand, rather than parsing out components to others who may not have the same level of commitment and belief or knowledge.  Jobs integrated software and hardware.  As analysts, we understand the nature of working with all that the patient brings us, rather than fragmenting and parcelling out the inner life to others, or following Freud, an integration of brain and body.

Space here limits.  I will focus on one ingredient of Jobs’ ingenuity, drive, specialness: his sense of being a “chosen” baby, chosen by his parents, rather than his focus on being abandoned (although, from his biography we see that this continued to play a tragic ostenato in his life).  How does choseness contribute to his ingenuity and creativity and the company he built?  The latter is more easily addressed.  He demanded and was proud that everyone at Apple as an A team player; the B teamers could work for someone else in the Silicon Valley. That is, he chose his co-workers and treated them as a chosen people.  Yet, the idea of being chosen cuts in two ways, Freud taught in “Moses and Monotheism.”  On the one hand, feeling chosen results in a belief in oneself and an ability for the Jews to endure severe vicissitudes over millenia.  It contributed, as he wrote in his talk to the B’nai Brith, in what he believed was his ability to endure isolation, denigration, disbelief in the early decades of his work. Perhaps more so, as much of his early work was based on his self-analysis, the Dream book in particular, Freud worked with a sense that plumbing the depths of the mundane, the obscure, even the obscene of his inner life could result in something productive, even sublime.  On the other hand, being chosen, Freud wrote, can elicit envy, sometimes because the Jews choseness could be seen as a stubborn stiff-necked quality.  Envy, Augustine called one of the seven deadly sins. While Augustine’s intention was that the individual who envies was sinning, as analysts, we can reinterpret Augustine.  Generating Envy in others can result in their hostile, even murderous impulses towards oneself.  Feeling chosen can result in a sense of belief in oneself, a specialness; and feeling chosen can also elicit envy and nasty responses in some others.  Such “choseness” envy is heard in this brief experience of an Israeli diplomat.  Decades ago, a senior Arab minister offered to meet secretly with the Israeli minister in a European city.  When the Israeli entered the Hotel room of the Arab, the flowing-robed minister opened with “So, what makes you people so chosen?”  To which the Israeli responded, “Want the job?”

What can we speculate are the ingredients of ingenuity in Jobs, based on what we read, what we know of his products, how he has made a dent in our universe?  The sense of choseness permitted him to believe in himself and what his mind sought; it resulted in his choosing those whom he felt would give their best.  He believed in a better future, in creating this future, at times not being certain what would become, but knowing that something good would become if one is severely demanding (of oneself, of others).  He pared away and pared away until he saw the essence of what the thing needed to become.  His aesthetic was one of the sculpture, as Michelangelo described the art: removing, chipping, sculpting away the stone until the sculpture within the marble is revealed.  (Unlike painting, in which layers are put on layers to create something.)  This sculpting, this parsing, this feeling for the sculpture within, is closer to our concept of psychoanalysis than is the layering on of paint (which perhaps applies to other psychotherapies).  While this is partial a list of character traits for ingenuity, it is what we can begin to discuss and explore as psychoanalysts.  Winnicott spoke of symptoms as creative acts, suggesting that “creativity” is not limited to artists or scientists; rather it is a quality that every person has. From this, we treat the symptoms with respect, even as we probe, explore and help remove the dross to reveal the elegance of the person within.  In this sense, as much as we can learn about ingenuity and a kind of genius of Jobs, we can begin to apply to our psychoanalytic work.  This I explore in the next post.

Book Review: On Latency: Individual Development, Narcissistic Impulse, Reminiscence and Cultural Ideal,” by Leticia Franieck and Michael Günter (Karnac, 2010)

This title borrows from Ted Shapiro’s classic and comprehensive article on Latency and evidence for its biological bases ((1976). Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 31:79-105.). Freud thought that latency was biologically based (although his focus was on the repression of early sexuality), leaving a fallow period before the eruption of puberty and its psychological accommodation, adolescence. Briefly, Shapiro collates developmental and neuroscience data to demonstrate that latency’s biological foundation. He also reaches back in time and across Western civilizations to show our sense that something changes profoundly at latency: for instance, the Catholic Church’s communion “recognizes” that the seven-year-old now is responsible for both venial and mortal sins; in Medieval times, boys were sent at seven to apprentice; or that my Ethiopian/Israeli parents took on shepherding and cooking responsibilities about this age in rural preliterate Ethiopia. Other features Shapiro summarizes about latency: they are emotionally less dependent on family; neuromuscular mastery of the environment; cognitive strategies to “outwit and control” the environment; inhibition and control of drives with lesser need for external controls and, perhaps above all, opposing internal structures, a cardinal characteristic that Freud identified in Western humankind.

I write this to review, “On Latency: Individual Development, Narcissistic Impulse, Reminiscence and Cultural Ideal,” by Leticia Franieck and Michael Günter (Karnac, 2010). Few will read this book, in large part because it is so costly. Occasionally, I will select such “orphaned” books here.

An alternative title might be “Latency Onset in Brazil and Germany: a bifurcation of development.” Franieck, Brazilian, lives in Tubingen, Germany. This bilingual, bicultural researcher studied seven year olds from intact families in both cultures. (She also is mother of twins born in Brazil and raised in Germany.) While not abjuring the universal qualities Shapiro cites, she found that the family’s values resulted in emphases on different developmental paths: one emphasizing individualism, self-sufficiency (Germany), the other emphasizing family connectedness and community.

To assess the psychoanalytic weight of the study, one should know how it was performed. Bear with us a bit. Franieck and Günter recruited non-clinical samples of 41 children in Brazil and 41 in Germany. They assessed the children’s inner views of self and other using the MacArthur story-stem measure: give a child a beginning of a story with dolls (For instance, Mom returns home saying her keys are missing, accusing Dad….; Parents leave for an overnight, while grandmother babysits…; Parents return from the trip…. ); then at the climax, ask the child to continue the stories and give them endings. The child’s narratives are assessed for content, relationships and affect and coherence. Child ratings assess social competence, internal control, emotional coherence, narrative coherence, moral themes, positive and negative representations, and expressions of mistrust.A questionnaire assessed the parents’ views of ego ideal and transmission of cultural values.

Franieck and Günter’s idea that cultural values are transmitted via the family harkens back to Aristotle’s Politics, in which he suggested that the family is a state and that the State’s values are transmitted via the family. Erik Erikson described the way in which parents transmit societal values by how they raise their children: toiletting, nursing and weaning (among the Sioux versus the Yurok Indians, for example). These researchers extend that idea.

They find that German parents successfully transmit the values of individual competence: self-sufficiency, individuality lead to self-esteem. Brazilian parents emphasize the importance of the family or group: solidarity, social empathy, family unity.

In their discussion, they refer to differences between “individualist” cultures (such as in North America and Western Europe) versus “collectivist” cultures (such as in Asia, Africa, South America). This reminds us of Bobby Paul’s elegant article on culture and psychoanalysis in IP.net (Click Here to Read This Article) in which he describes the importance of respect for authority in some Asian cultures, with consequent differences in psychoanalytic process. It also may connect with Piers and Singer’s classic, Shame and Guilt Societies, a psychoanalytic and anthropological exploration of these two emotions across cultures.

A brief plea here for publishers to help these books become more available. First, a publisher has some obligation at the least to decent copy-editing. Second, price books affordably. If this means making these into eBooks, that would be an advance in our field. I will be reviewing the biography of Steve Jobs, in which he convinced book publishers (and less successfully the New York Times, which he valued) to be more reasonable about pricing in order to both protect their market and also to reach readers. Jobs affected publishing from the outside, from Silicon Valley; we may need to influence academic publishers from the outside to promote distribution of intellectually rich work.

Franieck and Günter contribute significantly to understanding how development can appear to bifurcate at latency, although perhaps this bifurcation is along a continuum of “individualist” versus “collectivist” cultures. We hope to learn more from other psychoanalytic researchers in other cultures. This is another route to broadening the scope of psychoanalysis.

Shevrin addresses one crucial aspect of the recent dissatisfactions within the American Psychoanalytic: training analysis. Click Here to Read:

He states a foundational problem clearly: organizations value power. Privileged knowledge (the intimate vulnerabilities of a candidate’s personal life) when combined with official power (overseeing promotion, graduation, certification, TA status) results in a highly combustible and potentially corruptible organization, prone to alienation, revolution/rebellion or compliant identification. This power imbalance also cramps psychoanalytic knowledge, which ails from frequent newfangled fads, rather than systematic, disciplined reevaluations and progression. The nature of appointing training analysts, he argues, who oversee both education and treatment, results in coteries of fawning acolytes, adverse power dynamics in Institutes and distortion of scientific progress. His words are strong. How can we rethink our dilemma? Moreso, is there something systematic in our profession that feeds this ailment?

Shevrin’s approach is to look at the common features of any organization or institution, an approach productively used by Weber and by Goffman in his genius work, Asylums.

Yet, while organizations share common features, they also have identities that differentiate one from the other: a university, a corporation, the Department of Motor Vehicles all are organizations, but have features that differentiate them, an aspect of their identities. To some degree, knowing an organization’s identity helps guide us to how it is structured, who its members are and their relationships to each other: the university’s identity is developing and transmitting knowledge; the corporation, generating income; the DMV, licensing cars and drivers.

Let’s narrow our focus to identity. Kernberg, Richards and others have written about the question of our overall identity as an organization. For Kernberg, he looks at the range of external models: university, trade school, artistic enterprise and so forth. For Richards and Lynch, they look both historically at how psychoanalysis has evolved and systemically at how we function as a thought collective, using ideas from the sociology of science.

To keep this column need be brief, let’s laser-like focus on a peculiar feature of our identity, the (training) analysis and its inherent binds.

There are two binds in a good enough analysis: both are challenges for the analyst, one centers on the analysand, the other on the analyst (but for the analysand’s well-being). For the analysand, we build a framework to facilitate regression and temporary dependence. Freud’s early techniques — reclining on the couch, free association and related primary processes — remain fundamental despite all the changes in theory. Winnicott elaborated the idea of a state of dependency to facilitate regression (at times this went awry with some followers). But, paradoxically, an ultimate, an optimal aim of psychoanalysis is to foster autonomy: in Western life, since the Enlightenment and political revolutions, autonomy — self-rule — is highly valued. Erik Fromm described the next step in true freedom: internal self-rule (and its attendant responsibilities) in Escape from Freedom. (R. Paul’s paper presented at the Chicago IPA makes this cultural distinction from some Eastern perspectives that emphasize reverence for authority.)

The Analyst’s responsibility: to help the analysand get from here, to there, to an other there: from the initial states of mind, to temporary dependency, to autonomy. Autonomy is not abstract: the capacity for self-reflection, to self-regulate, to take a realistic sense of responsibility for one’s actions and further.

In a training analysis, psychoanalytic life gets far more complicated: a true regression makes the analysand very vulnerable; even if with no “reporting.” Further, autonomy may be limited by what the analyst or the Institute will tolerate. Too many outsiders have left because their ideas could not be tolerated within the thought collective (perhaps at times, rightly so). Not reporting training analyses is no panacea: one senior colleague (now a training analyst) recalls the following conversation when he sat in a stall of the Institute’s men’s room. Analyst One — on the progression committee – is at a urinal; Analyst Two enters, uses the facility adjacent. Analyst One, “”So-and-so” (in analysis with Analyst Two) applied for a second control case.” Analyst Two, “Really? I haven’t heard anything about this.” Both flush, leave, and the candidate’s progression goes down the tubes too.

But, what about the analyst; what’s the second bind? We expect the analyst to permit, to tolerate, to make safe the regression (in service of the ego) and dependency. But, we also hope, we should expect, that the analyst is sufficiently self-secure that (s)he will permit as full autonomy as the analysand can achieve. The analyst’s narcissistic vulnerability threatens autonomy. We recall that Kohut got his initial ideas about narcissism from watching his colleagues. One of Winnicott’s analysands, Alfred Flarsheim, remarked in supervision, “It’s O.K. for the patient to think I am god. Not good for me to believe that.”

Where’s does this leave us as an organization? External structures help: Shevrin, Richards, Kernberg make several recommendations. But, analysts value the internal, our psychic structure, the place where autonomy resides. Paradoxically, our personal and ongoing self-analyses need be sufficient enough that we feel sufficient gratification in our work, in our lives, secure within ourselves to permit analysands not only regression, but also movements toward autonomy. External structural changes, as suggested by Shevrin and others, are a safeguard; but our inner life is the stage where our analysands can play out the their scenarios and come to safe resolution. At the end of an analysis, the analyst need break his magic transference staff, like Prospero, and permit Ariel to go free.

Sex sells, still. Psychotic sex even better. And if you can screw psychoanalysis while reviewing a sex book, maybe improves the Amazon ratings. How’s this for an eyeball grabber:

“Slice them where you will, any collection of psychoanalysts is as mad as a parliament. Novelty beards, whirling eyes, twitches, deranged clothing, tics, jitters and habits you wouldn’t want to go into. But Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was the maddest of the lot”

That’s the opening to a review of “Adventures in the Orgasmatron:
Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex,” by Turner.

Click Here to Read: Novelty Acts The sexual revolutions before the sexual revolution.by Ariel Levy in the New Yorkeron September 19, 2011.

Can you tolerate something unsexy by Reich? Or, how far can you read this piece on Reich’s classic, Character Analysis, if I don’t say “sex” hereafter (but will touch on psychosis at the end)?

A challenge reading Reich: one of my teachers, Al Flarsheim (analyzed by Gitelson and Winnicott in that order) said of his copy of Reich the following. Flarsheim tried to take a razor blade to his edition to “edit out” the psychotic sections from the gem of character analysis: couldn’t do it; the craziness imbricates with the genius.

I will select segments of the Character Analysis, not only for its historical value, this 1933 publication, but also to its relevance to contemporary psychoanalytic technique. There’s a challenge. Since this weekly column is brief, my hope is to catalyze rethinking character, possibly re-reading Reich, even without a razor blade poised above the page.

Freud set us on the path of character beginning with the 1908 anal character  (orderly, parsimonious, obstinate), then in his brief 1916 “Some character types met with in psychoanalytic work.” This is mostly a descriptive account of “The ‘Exceptions,’” “Those Wrecked by Success,” and “Criminals from a Sense of Guilt.”

But why “character,” not “personality” Emanuel Berman asked when I told him that I was teaching a course on character at the Hebrew University. Both words arise from the Greek, although “persona” migrated through Latin. In Greek, “character” means to be etched into; there is a permanence, a consistency about it. “Persona” in Greek were the masks that actors used to portray different roles; they can be slipped off, changed with the need. That is, character is something that is etched into our bones; wherever we turn (whether we are parent, child, teacher, analyst), character (if reasonably well-formed) stays recognizable. Persona (Jung’s preferred term) we can shift like our clothes — from suit to racing shorts; from high heels to Keds; from Alexander McQueen to L.L. Bean — depending on the circumstances.

For Reich, character is even embodied in how we walk, move, present ourselves physically, wordlessly: the forthright; the despondent; the proud; the humble; the self-assured; the mousey Milquetoast. Reich watches as we enter the office, how we lay on the couch.

He suggests several characteristics of character neuroses: lack of insight (versus the neurotic symptom, which is “experienced as a foreign body”); rationalizations of the character neurosis, as it is a “way of being” (as if the person were born this way; unalterably); and the character is armored, protected, against change, such as threatened by psychoanalysis. If this sounds a bit like everyone who enters analysis, then it is an example of “mission creep” that happens with other analytic schools, which may begin with treating a specific diagnosis, then extends this technique to many more, if not all diagnosis: Kohut’s initial ideas about treating narcissistic character was extended as a general approach to many other forms of adult work by Ornstein and others.

Reich introduces us to some character types: the hysterical, the compulsive, the phallic-narcissistic the masochist. The latter, masochism, is his most detailed account. He describes vividly how the form, the manner in which someone presents material is primary in grasping character; the content can be quite secondary, even distracting. He concurs with Glover and Alexander, who distinguish the symptom neurosis from the character neurosis, then suggests that most analysis involve character neurosis: the way in which one lives in, relates to the world and oneself, not simply specific symptoms.

Reich gives detailed process material to demonstrate how he judges when to interpret, what to interpret and how he works in psychic layers. In one vignette, he lays out before us five layers coexisting simultaneously in a session, in how the patient splays out his inner life. Then, Reich explains why he doesn’t speak to the deepest layers (t/he more infantile origins), rather to what he calls the character resistance — “a form of acting or reacting” — or what we may call the lively transference of the moment. Reich then shows how the infantile material unfolds once the transference (the character resistance) is interpreted. He also candidly gives a vignette where he interpreted the infantile origins of the material before speaking to the resistance — he calls this a premature interpretation — and how this resulted in an adverse shift in the analysand’s work.

We discern here, when Reich cautions against premature interpretation — that is, speaking to the infantile origins before the character resistance — a critique of Klein’s approach. While Reich does not mention her, what he says is consistent with Glover’s (Klein’s daughter’s analyst) and Schmideberg’s (Klein’s daughter) direct attacks on Klein’s style of interpretation. Perhaps Reich’s indirection and process notes are more persuasive.

By the early 1930;’s Reich’s more psychotic biophysical” approach begins to infest his character book. He begins to lay on hands in some cases (reminiscent of Freud’s early massaging of some hysteria cases). One can read the later editions of the Character book in the way that Freud read the Schreber case: it could teach us more about the development of a delusional system in a brilliant, tragic character than about treatment.

Bruno Bettelheim, a friend of Reich’s in Vienna, told me this story. After Reich was locked away in an insane asylum shortly before his death, Bettelheim went to visit. Reich said as Bettelheim entered, “So, you want to talk about the good old times or the crazy times?” Turner has written an entertaining book. He is not entirely convincing that it was Reich who imported s-x with his zinc and steel-wool lined and orgasmatron. Character is less sexy, but closer to our everyday concerns in the office.