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Review of Unfree
Associations: Inside Psychoanalytic Institutes by Douglas Kirsner. London: Process Press, 2000. Pb
Pp. viii+324
Price:19.95 British pounds
sterling. ISBN1-899209-12-3
Reviewed by Kenneth Eisold
This
extraordinary book is a labour of love and of rage. I say “love” because it has obviously been painstakingly
compiled. Distilled from
interviews with over 150 psychoanalysts conducted over almost 20 years, it
carefully details the stories of many of the upheavals and schisms that
have beset four of most prominent American psychoanalytic institutes, The
New York Institute, The Boston, The Chicago, and The Los Angeles (LAPSI).
Kirsner tells a number of stories that not only never
have been told before in such a balanced and fair-minded way, but stories
that I had believed could never be told. Through his profound engagement with his subject and his
determination to get it right, he has retrieved these events from the
fading memories and obscure records of those who lived through them and
who, often, played major roles themselves. Clearly, much has been lost to the dustbin of history, but almost
single handedly Kirsner has retrieved these remarkable stories of
rivalries, plots, vendettas, narcissistic exploits and injuries as well as
idealistic and repressive crusades that comprise the secret history of
American psychoanalysis. In
doing so, he has provided us with an unparalleled opportunity to better
understand our institutional history and professional dilemmas.
It is also a labour of love because it tries to stand
apart from the events it depicts and understand them without blame. That
is, he calls attention to the anxieties, ambitions and petty motivations
of the leaders who brought about these painful events, unsparingly at
times, but he doesn’t scapegoat them. This is no mean feat as, obviously, no one could undertake such a
project without getting caught up again and again in the issues. This is especially true as he has personally met with so many of
the key players and allowed himself to be influenced by their points of
view. Thus the book bears the
earmarks of understanding born of attachment and struggle. No doubt that is why he has been able to gain the co-operation and
endorsement of so many prominent analysts and historians of psychoanalysis
throughout the course of his prolonged researches.
But it is also, clearly, a labour of rage. These are
ugly stories of how our institutes abused the trust of their candidates
and members and undermined their own capacities to thrive. Kirsner is unsparing in his portrait, determined that the events be
laid bare in all their harsh detail. Fiercely, he exposes how American psychoanalysis engineered its own
decline, discrediting itself and, often, betraying its own standards and
values in the process.
That rage raises these stories to the level of
tragedy. Kirsner obviously
understands and appreciates the enormous value of what has been lost. These institutes, like tragic heroes, inevitably and
uncomprehendingly struggled to bring about their own decline. Representing powerful and immensely valuable ideas and practices,
nevertheless with hubris and ignorance, they were caught in the net of
their own practices and beliefs; they
brought about their own fates. Self-righteous
and intolerant as so many of the players in these stories were, they were
also motivated by convictions that mattered deeply to them -- as well as
by profound terrors that drove them, often, to acts of malice and self
destruction.
We often satirise and ridicule our history -- and
distance ourselves from it as well -- by claiming the analogy of religious
wars. But in doing so what we
forget is how deeply motivated those sectarian battles were (and, in some
settings, still are). Our
present liberal religious tolerance is purchased by an indifference and
detachment to the issues they represent.
What Kirsner makes possible for us to do now is think
more clearly into the contradictions and dilemmas of our professional
practices. To a high degree,
of course, the stories he tells represent the working out of our flawed
inheritance: the legacy of
charismatic authority, of proprietary entitlement, and secret
manipulation. Freud and his apostles were our leaders in this. But more importantly, he points us in the direction of
understanding our on-going unresolved professional problems: the contradictions in our training practices, the limitations in
our institute structures, the ambiguities of our professional identities.
He concludes with trenchant observations about the
“false expertise” we have traditionally laid claim to. That is, preoccupied as we have been with our own theoretical
orientations, we have never been able to identify -- never truly wanted to
learn -- what constitutes psychoanalytic competence. As a result, training is fatally compromised. Because we have not studied the outcomes of our practices in any
serious or systematic way, we have refrained from systematically linking
our training to those outcomes. As
a result, our training practices are determined by such extraneous
concerns as controlling candidates, promoting the careers of those in
power, and indulging in the wish for certainty about the unknown.
This is not to say that our training and supervising
analysts are irresponsible or incompetent. On the contrary, I believe that many, if not most, of them are
serious and dedicated. But it
is to say that they have been abandoned by our institutions to cope with
these issues in an anarchic and isolated way. Institutionally, psychoanalysis has so far failed to assume the
responsibility of studying and clarifying its own practices.
Kirsner makes an extremely important point. I would add that the stories he tells makes it possible to arrive
at other thoughts as well about our professional practices. But even to say this is to acknowledge his place among those
thinkers about our institutional reality to whom we owe the greatest of
debts.
This review will appear in Free Associations
Address for correspondence with reviewer:
Kenneth Eisold
285 Central Park West
New York, NY 10024
Tel. (212) 874-7143
keneisold@aol.com
You can order this book
directly from the publisher by post, fax or email from Process Press Ltd.,
26 Freegrove Road, London N7 9RQ
Fax. +44 (0) 171 609 4837
Email: pp@rmy1.demon.co.uk
Price: 19.95 British pounds
sterling + 1.50 P&P
Payment by cheque in
British pounds sterling or by credit card, giving name on card, billing
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Publisher's description:
This is the most thorough,
revealing and illuminating account of the inner workings of psychoanalytic
institutions that has ever been written. It comprises ground-breaking, in
depth, recent political histories of the four leading psychoanalytic
institutes in the United States — New York, Boston, Chicago and Los
Angeles - based on the author's extensive field work. Kirsner also
provides dramatic insights into what psychoanalysts and their institutions
have contributed to what has gone wrong with psychoanalysis.
The result is a fascinating
series of portraits of these institutes — their organisations, their
cultures, their ways of mediating conflict and how they have survived. In
addition to archival research, the book is built on scores of interviews
with prominent psychoanalysts who were often protagonists in the stories of their institutes.
Many themes emerge in Kirsner's gripping yet scholarly accounts.
Most importantly, he demonstrates that issues surrounding the right to
train are central to psychoanalytic disputes. In his study of the Los
Angeles institute he also shows how a doctrinal dispute between Kleinians
and ego psychologists got interwoven with group dynamics. Moreover, Unfree
Associations examines the
problems of psychoanalysis, a
humanistic discipline that has been touted as a science on the model of
the natural sciences but has been organized institutionally as a religion.
Interest in this book should not be confined to psychoanalysts. It
is a rich set of case studies in the vicissitudes of group relations, with
the ironic twist that the members of these organisations profess to have
special insight into human nature and how people get along with one another.
Douglas Kirsner, PhD is
Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and History of Ideas at Deakin University,
Australia, where he teaches philosophy and psychoanalytic studies. He
founded the annual Deakin University Freud Conference which he directed
for twenty years. He is the author of The Schizoid World of Jean-Paul Sartre and R. D. Laing, and numerous articles about psychoanalysis.
Comments on Unfree Associations:
'It is a work of
scholarship that is unparalleled in its field. Truly a magnum opus.'
— Charles Brenner, MD,
author of An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis and The
Mind in Conflict
'Using extensive interviews
and documents Kirsner has written am arresting, definitive account of the
internal politics o psychoanalytic institutes and their sometimes
paralysing effects on policy and research.'
— Nathan Hale, Ph.D. author of Freud
and the Americans and The Rise
and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States
'Douglas Kirsner has
produced a pioneering study of the operations of psychoanalytic
Institutes. Unfree Associations traces the consequences of various
organisational arrangements on their vital functions. It also presents a
veritable nosology of the ills that beset analytic education. Kirsner's
case studies are focused on four of the most influential Institutes in
North America. The database he has collected is both convincing and
astonishing. His conclusions transcend the problems of psychoanalytic
education, for they are equally relevant to the fate of psychoanalysis as
a body of knowledge.'
— John E. Gedo MD, author
of Psychoanalysis and Its
Discontents,; Spleen and
Nostalgia: A Life and Work in Psychoanalysis ; Beyond
Interpretation. and The
Languages of Psychoanalysis.
'As a survivor of a
paradigmatic split (Boston 1973), I can attest to Prof Kirsner's
sensitivity and precision, in collecting many accounts of these traumatic
events. He has recorded dozens of sympathetic interviews, in which each
informant reports his or her own version of what happened, and he has
reviewed hundreds of documents. From these conflicting and complex
details, he has woven a seamless web that is both scholarly &
extremely readable.
'From this brilliant
historical reconstruction, the general as well as the scholarly reader
will learn how complex & easily forgotten are the details of
relatively recent events. As a sympathetic interviewer of the analysts who
survived these traumatic experiences, each with a different view of what
happened, Kirsner has created
a unified narrative that makes lively and dramatic reading. Historians of
psychoanalysis will also be grateful for the wealth of factual detail he
has preserved.'
— Sanford Gifford, MD, Chair of the History and Archives
Division of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
"I should be
embarrassed about having known so little about American psychoanalysis,
but I am just grateful to Douglas Kirsner for having done all the hard
work which has brought up so much that is new. Kirsner is balanced and
impartial; his interviewing has yielded a rich storehouse of material
which makes a wonderful book.'
— Paul Roazen, PhD, author of Freud
and his Followers; Erik H.
Erikson: The Power and Limits of a Vision and Brother
Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk
"Kirsner's study of
the dissensions in the most expansively successful psychoanalytic culture
in the world is not only an extremely impressive piece of social and
historical research, but is also a revelation concerning the local causes
of bitter feuds and squabbles amongst Freud's most orthodox progeny.
Whether the issues were money, professional style, parochial
empire-building or the future developments of clinical technique and
scientific theory, Kirsner gives a clear and unbiassed account of the at
times bitter struggles. It will be absolutely indispensable to all those
interested in the fate of professional societies, scientific institutions
and the rise and fall of American psychoanalysis.'
— John Forrester, PhD, Reader in History and Philosophy of the Sciences, University of Cambridge. Author of Dispatches from the Freud Wars; Truth Games and The Seductions of Psychoanalysis