Adolescent Psychoanalysis

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”  (Gill Scott Heron)

Chapter 12

From ‘Then’ to ‘Now’

Part 1

(Extensively Revised 2/4/09)

Writing this chapter is necessary for me. I intend to get from ‘There’ to ‘Now”,’ trying to describe the trip - The making of this Adolescent Analyst. The beginning of ‘There,’ arbitrarily starts as I start as a candidate in the Los Angeles Institute.  Obviously, no one’s life starts at age 29.  The first 29 years of me, and their importance, will have to remain a mystery. 

What I mean by ‘necessary’ is a feeling of my own that I hope my experiences with respect to psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic training, analytic institutes, AND, in my experience, analytic and theoretical arrogance, may be of some use to others in my position as well as to the others in the general field of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic training.  These and other issues are of particular relevance to the analysis of adolescents.

Some parts of this chapter are controversial. To write about my experiences during this time, I cannot avoid personalities.  That is the controversial part.  However, minus the personalities and the people and the places, at least as experienced by me, my ‘There’ loses a large part of it’s meaning.

Out of deference to some people I mention, many of whom are still living, I will use some pseudonyms in place of actual names. Names may be changed; the account will not. Some places will be changed, others not. Events will not be changed.

The beginning of ‘Then” —1971

My background prior to entering my Psychiatric Residency at UCLA was very ordinary. Approximately 1 year into my Residency at the UCLA NPI, I knew that I wanted to be a Psychoanalyst and to be trained at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.  Why the latter, I do not know, since there was one other choice, the Southern California Institute.  During my Residency, I began to meet a wide variety of new people, both fellow residents, senior members of the Faculty and Senior members of the Los Angeles Institute. Amongst the latter, I became acquainted with two well-known and brilliant analysts, who were both Kleinians.  They captivated me.   The theories and work of Melanie Klein seemed to offer all the answers that anyone would need to be an analyst, especially a very good one.

I was hooked.  The work of Klein made so much sense to me that I took it on with a religious fervor.  One of my fellow UCLA residents and then good friend, who was also at that time at least, a fellow Kleinian, and I, ‘found’ evidence of Klein’s Paranoid-Schizoid and Depressive positions all over the place, especially in music.  We concluded, for example, that the much unfairly maligned John Denver and his song, “Poems, Prayers and Promises,” illustrated dramatically what Klein must have met by the Depressive Position.

I should add an extremely important point.  All the information, initially at least, about the ‘evils’ of the ‘Traditional Americans’ (the name selected by some members of the Institute to represent the ‘Freudian’ group (see below) and the American Psychoanalytic Association, and the International Psychoanalytic Association (less the latter)) were provided to us junior Kleinians by senior Kleinians.   We all know the problem.  If you are taught the meaning of what you see by someone you respect and believe, you ‘see it and believe ‘it’.  Further, such ‘beliefs’ lead to the search to find further evidence to support the truth of the ‘Beliefs’.  ‘Beliefs’ lead to further ‘beliefs’. And so forth.

Earlier fighting, years before had lead to a split in the Institute, resulting in the Los Angeles Institute and the Southern California Institute. The earlier fighting had nothing to do with the Kleinians, since there weren’t any, but about other issues.

This fighting, which had been bad before and had lead to a split, was escalating again.  Same people, same fighting, different banners. The fighting between the “Traditional Americans” and the Kleinians was fierce.  The Kleinians were accused of being heretics, not analysts, etc.  Teaching assignments for Kleinians were reduced.  At one point, the Kleinians, considering all of the above, were considered non-analysts and there was an attempt to move candidates from ‘unacceptable’ (Kleinian) analysts  to acceptable analysts. Not a pretty picture.

This fighting knew no limits short of actual physical assault. There was subterfuge, lying, manipulating, etc., all the stuff of a good soap opera or gossip magazine, by both sides.  However, it wasn’t a soap opera.  It was serious fighting about a serious topic—Psychoanalysis—even though the fighting was terribly misguided.

For example, if one were a Kleinian candidate, the decided underdog in the ‘fight’, there were a number of unwritten rules that this Candidate must follow.  One would only ‘speak’ Kleinian in certain off grounds locations, certainly not in the institute itself, but for rare occasions. The general idea, correct or not, was that you could just as well get a gun and shoot yourself if you engaged in that form of ‘free speech’ in the wrong place, or with the wrong analyst.

The Kleinians, for their part, were a group of ‘true believers’, who knew deeply that they were ‘right’. I was a ‘true believer’. They were fiercely opposed by the Traditional Americans, another and larger group of ‘true believers’. They too also bore the banner of holding the ‘ultimate truth’. The Kleinians were under siege. The Traditional Americans felt they were being assaulted by the Kleinians, and vice versa.  

The Kleinians, to counteract this problem, undertook a number of maneuvers.  As said above, from a Candidates point of view, you didn’t talk ‘Kleinian’ except in ‘safe’ places.  There needed to be, so it was felt, probably accurately, careful presentations of clinical material in supervisions with ‘Traditional Americans’ lest the Candidate be found out to be part of the heretical Kleinian group.  What this lead to was Kleinian candidates out and out lying about cases to Traditional American Supervising Analysts.  The Kleinians were accused of taking into analysis any applicant, including those who suffered severe disorders of thought.  These were “un-analyzable patients”, according to the Traditional Americans. Hence, to ‘hide’ these patients’ histories and clinical material, was considered mandatory. If you were a Kleinian, such behavior was said, by the Kleinians, to be the only way to survive. 

It was quite a trick to treat a patient with Kleinian techniques, hide the ‘truth’ of the patient from the ‘Traditional American’ supervisors, hide the actual elements of treatment as it was actually done from the ‘Traditional American’ supervisor, and then to construct all the elements just mentioned in both written and spoken in a form thought to be acceptable to the Supervising Analyst and the American Psychoanalytic Association.

If nothing else, in Los Angeles at least, one learned a set of skills that, to put it mildly, often violated nearly all agreed upon, ordinary ethical principles of Psychoanalysis and the rest of life. These skills might prove useful elsewhere in other professions, however.   Maybe a crook, a politician, a Wall Street Banker, other government officials, etc., would have signed on for the training.

(I actually think, counter-intuitively, that I got a great deal out of this melodramatic aspect of my training.   However, at the same time, many aspects of my training and my analysis were ordinary.  Other aspects were absent and/or distorted.  Learning about Freud, for example, was badly marred.  Perhaps everyone was too busy with more important issues to worry about that).

For example, I was told by my analyst, that the Los Angeles Institute was going to be informed by him that I had finished my ‘training’ analysis.  I was four years into my analysis at that time and not even close to being finished with my analysis. At that time, the Los Angeles Institute had a rule that limited the number of candidates that could be analyzed by any one training analyst, at one time. I believe the number was four. Hence, my ‘finishing’ meant that my analyst could take on another candidate, since my ‘position’ opened up. He, of course, filled it.  Sadly, he and I believed this to be the appropriate action at that time. At this time, ‘Now’, this and many other actions were performed that were obviously corrupt and bore no relationship to actual training or any other kind of psychoanalysis.  If you wanted more Kleinians you needed to have Kleinian training analysts available so that an analysis with a Kleinian training analysts could take place. The more Kleinians, the merrier.

The ‘Lawsuit’ was one of the next major events related directly to this edition of the fighting. My analyst filed suit against the LA Institute seeking to enjoin them from limiting the number of training analyses that could be performed by any one training analyst. Further, the Kleinians wanted the length of time that an analysis could be considered a training analysis, not a personal analysis, to be shortened to a fixed number of years. A much more detailed account of this fighting can be read in Dr. Bail’s paper “Psychoanalysis and the Fisher King” about which I will have more to say later.

Some might say that I was too young to know better or should have been better protected. They are probably right. Any of us who are familiar with the intense emotional experience and dependence on our analyst that occurs in analysis, can easily understand that.

We can definitely say that about our adolescent analytic patients.   We owe them a set of principles that are moral, ethical, professional, principled, etc.,  and for those standards to be used consistently.   Collusion cannot be allowed. To that end and others respects, adolescents need our protection, in spite their overt and covert protestations. About the time that we advertently or inadvertently manipulate or collude with our adolescent patients, we have stripped them of any possibility of being psychoanalyzed.  Psycho-something, yes.  Psychoanalysis—no.  We, as analysts, should know the difference.  If we can’t identify manipulation, not allow manipulation, not manipulate, then we should find another occupation.  Corruption should be easy for us to find and eliminate.  It obviously wasn’t. We cannot hide behind the shield of innocent ‘true’ believer-ship.  Manipulation is manipulation.  We all know that.

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