Membership Society Meeting

The semiannual meeting of The Membership Society of the Westchester Institute took place on Saturday, January 19, 2008. Robert B. Marchesani, MSSc,LP, our new Dean and Executive Director, spoke about the advantages of an eclectic psychoanalytic education in today’s world.  Here is his talk:

Advantages of an Eclectic Psychoanalytic Educationr

From its beginnings, psychoanalysis could not be contained in one method, one theory, one way. Freud's own conversations with Jung, Adler and others saw disagreements that created new interpretations of psychoanalysis and new schools of thought even as Freud was struggling to define and redefine his theories. 

Every psychoanalytic candidate comes into this field with a personal inquiry. That inquiry usually moves in one of two directions - one is to and about our own lives and inner workings. The other is to and about someone other than ourselves whether it begins with our wondering about mom or dad or a sibling we are curious about, or maybe even, a lover.

That inquiry into ourselves comes into conflict when the inquiry into the Other is considered because it is at that point that our differences occur, clash, and ultimately show us who we are. One could argue that all was calm and peaceful in the Garden of Eden when it was just Adam and his disembodied father creator, if you believe in the Biblical story of the genesis of humanity. When Eve came along there was another to consider, including another opinion about the father and his rules for their life in the garden. Now, had God created Eve first and then Adam it's not clear if anything would have been different except that difference itself still would have been introduced.

Whether we believe the story of Genesis or not, Freud began his inquiry into the human psyche precisely on this point of sexual, that is, gender difference. And he did so through that pathway of dreams which he deemed the royal road to the unconscious. He knew enough to assert that we are moved by underground forces, those which are often invisible to the eye. It is this realm that we study in our inquiry into our dream lives.

And our dream lives expand to day dreams and ideas that we have about our lives as in what dreams do we hold for ourselves? The night meets the day in the land of dreams. Yet, much as there are those who don't believe in Genesis, sure enough soon after Freud asserted his theory of sexuality and its importance in human development, Jung came along and made his own departure on that point. When I was writing this I first wrote "department" instead of "departure" and thought, honoring my Freudian slip, now that we have eclectic institutes, while we don't call them departments, we might one day have departments if we grow large enough. Imagine a department of Jungian Studies. A department of Freudian Studies. Of course others would follow.

This Westchester Institute has made its mark with one focus on dreams offering a Jungian approach in its famous dream seminar which Donald Kalshed envisioned and actualized.

My own training began at the Philadelphia School of Psychoanalysis. We had classes on Freud and Jung, Klein, Kohut, Fairbairn, Winnicott and others. I soon learned about the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis - NAAP which is where I first wrote about the founding of the Gradiva Awards which was Robert Quackenbush's creation. A prolific author and illustrator himself of over 200 children’s books, Quackenbush created the awards to honor those books and articles, movies and plays that expand our way of thinking about psychoanalysis and its relation to our lives and our world. Soon, I was invited to become co-editor of the journal and book series The Psychotherapy Patient for Haworth Press. There I wrote about and edited issues concerning panic and stage fright, performance anxiety and the impact of 9/11.

I first met Jeffrey Rubin during an author’s book signing event we arranged at NAAP. His book A Psychoanalysis for Our Time seemed relevant to the current trends in the field and led me to find his chapter in another colleague’s book on Psychoanalysis and Buddhism. Yet, it was only recently that I observed something curious in a famous photo of Freud’s study in which there are several statues of the heads of ancient figures from antiquity. Three of them are Indian, one of which is clearly the head of the Buddha. I remember seeing the same head in a little antique shop in the West Village when I was studying psychoanalysis at the New School and thinking to myself, “I would love this for my office but would it be appropriate for my patients?”

Rubin has been exploring through his writings and teachings the disciplines of psychoanalysis and meditation, something which Jennifer Harper, former dean and graduate of the institute, remarked about during her response to the keynote speaker Jurgen Reeder at the recent conference on the Future of Psychoanalytic Education.  She wrote, "...it is invigorating to integrate other disciplines into our own. We see this when psychoanalysis is paired with spiritual and medita-tion practices as we try to make the psychoanalytic experience more vital and transforming. We are in search of something more Vital..."

Yet, by its very nature, psychoanalytic training prepares us to sit with an individual and hear everything they have to say even if we don’t believe in Buddhism or practice meditation. Whether our patients or clients are believers of any one faith or not, their human story is what they bring to us to keep in confidence and to cherish as sacred.

One patient tells me often in our work how much people need therapy. For all the dreams we have, the relationships we are in, the histories we carry, how do we make sense of our lives without exploration with another? What happens in the most extreme breakdowns shows individuals almost trapped in their own heavy heads and broken hearts. To use the words of the once popular Broadway play Into The Woods, "It Takes Two. It takes me. It takes you!”

Freud invented neither Oedipus nor Narcissus. He found them in stories already written, one on the Greek stage of Sophocles' own writings. But he recognized what lies behind their universal appeal, their timeless wisdom.

These stories are relevant today. When 60 Minutes aired a special about the Mammoni in March of 2001, I met a psychologist at a conference who invited me to write a chapter about it in her book In Our Own Voices: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Italian and Italian American Women (Bordighera, 2003).   Mammoni is an Italian term which means "Momma's Boys" and is attributed to those Italian men who are not marrying and not leaving their mother's home. As a result, they are also not having children and are causing the projected population of Italy to nearly halve itself in 40 years! I applied Oedipus to the mother-son relationships of the mammoni to illuminate the dilemma that also is a problem not just in Italy but in other countries like the US where it is not uncommon for men to return to their mother's homes after college to live and to avoid leaving the nest to build one of their own.

In the writings of one of the founders of the Institute, I found this passage:

"We discover who we are and what we are in no other way than by experiencing ourselves over and against the other, in both harmony and disharmony. And the more genuinely we experience the uniqueness of the other, the more profoundly we recognize our own. There is no laboratory or test tube substitute for this intensely human experience of ourselves. It comes to us only through each other."

Herbert Holt wrote that in his book, Free to Be Good or Bad. Holt may have articulated a most succinct statement about object relations, intersubjectivity and relational analysis. Now just why he subtitled the book, An Anti Self-Improvement Book isn't clear to me but I haven't finished his book yet. Was this his wit that he was expressing, a kind of dry sense of humor which marked Freud's own writings?

It might be that he was expressing what Shakespeare himself once said that "Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Despite the obvious objections we can all make to such statements, there is an implicit nonjudgmental attitude in the neutrality or the free will that is implicitly granted in the title of Holt's book. Even in another statement I found early on when I arrived at the Institute over the summer, we can see something different in his approach, this time in his focus on training:

“…We want to create professional people who manifest the greater versatility of being creative, courageous and bold… (who) have the ability to be controlled and/or loose, sensible and/or crazy, sober and/or playful. We consider this state of being and all its potential flexibility psychologically healthy and scientifically creative.”

Many times I heard in my training that we try to get at all parts of our personality. Indeed, in paving the way to the unconscious, Freud deemed our dreams the royal road because it was in our dreams that he found that safe place to allow almost anything to be possible. We can defy gravity and fly, visit with people from our past, grant ourselves wishes we might never concede to in our waking lives, in short, it is a private movie screening room of our minds and our souls.

In an extensive article on psychoanalysis that appeared in The New Yorker in 1980, Bruno Bettelheim showed us that Freud's term psychoanalysis was mistranslated from the German when it came to America. It originally meant an analysis of the soul. Associations to the word soul can extend from the religious to the secular especially for those of us who grew up on The Soul Train which aired just about this time every Saturday!

But the soul is another distinguishing feature and measure of this institute's particular eclecticism. From its beginning, Holt and his colleagues trained clergy, rabbis, ministers, and priests to do therapy before it became fashionable to do so. Yet, others have said psychoanalysts are lay ministers of souls. With or without belief in God, the human spirit has a life of its own. And that life is a complex one. And one which can be said to be eclectic itself often having conflictual desires and impulses, various ways of being or personas, multidimensions and states of being yet unified under certain practices like psychoanalysis which makes connections among the unconscious components of our mental processes. In short, it has a unifying effect when it takes the components or fragments whether from our dream material, verbalized associations or even silences, and somehow in each individual practitioner's way, sums up an observation, offers an interpretation or simply a different point of view.

It was for this reason that I studied psychoanalysis and film in my graduate studies at the New School. In her observations on a movie set in the 1950s, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker called Hollywood the Dream factory, realizing how much movies operate like our dreams. Both occur in the dark. Both grab hold of our attention with convincing images that sometimes tighten our bodies, make us laugh, cry, scream in fright or just watch silently what sometimes does not make sense but still gives us food for thought about not only our lives but the lives of others.

In Jurgen Reeder’s book Hate and Love in Psychoanalytical Institutions: The Dilemma of Profession, he writes that the analyst has to deal with another kind of hope, which he calls “faith in the Other,” stating, “the Other is always beyond the reach of my knowledge, my fantasies, or my wish to objectify him….it is an attitude of expectancy founded in the faith that truth and more understanding are on their way.”

There is a faith we place in each other, a faith we find in ourselves – a faith we place in something and someone greater, a faith we hold to carry us through our doubts because we know that there is more to life than what meets the eye as we see in our dreams and in our movies. We know there are shadows that each of us caste, unknown parts that beg and also repel our attention.

Last year I led a seminar for an institute on the Self in relation to the Other and our other Selves as we sometimes find. The idea for the seminar came one day after I was particularly taken by the t-shirt of a man in Times Square which sported the quote: "In each of us two opposites are at war - good and evil" from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which had made it to Broadway as a musical.  Thank God with enough analysis and life, there comes a time when a truce is signed and the war subsides, but not in everyone and not always. 

At the end of A Psychoanalysis for Our Time: The Blindness of the Seeing Eye, Rubin states: “Freud’s remark that ‘psychoanalysis brings out the worst in everyone’ was prophetic. Not only does it illuminate our deepest fears and conflicts, but it also arouses intense antipathy in its antagonists. But psychoanalysis can also bring out the best in us. And that is why it is indispensible for our time.”

We might say the same about marriage, indeed about any relationship that goes deep enough to touch all of us and bring all of us to light.

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