Adolescent Psychoanalysis

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

Chapter 12

From There to Now (cont)

Part 4

(Extensively Revised 2/22/09)

In the midst of the fighting, The American Psychoanalytic Association concluded that the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute needed help.  Who could argue.  Remember, however, the American Psychoanalytic was characterized to us Kleinian Candidates by Senior Kleinians, as a powerful enemy of Klein—which some or many Traditional American members certainly were. Obviously some weren’t.

The American requested that a contingent of Senior Faculty and Candidates from the Los Angeles Institute visit the Denver Institute for some help.   Somehow I was included in this group by the administration of the LA Institute, who were stridently Anti-Kleinian and fervently Pro-Traditional American.  All that being true, I shouldn’t have been picked. Nevertheless, at least one candidate (me) or more (I’m not sure), as well as a number of Senior Training Analysts, mostly Traditional Americans and a few Kleinians, traveled to the Denver Institute, ostensibly to receive help.

That meeting had a profound effect on me in spite of its beginning. At the outset of the meeting, with all of the Los Angeles contingent plus members and candidates of the Denver Institute present, was a talk by Joan Flemming, M.D., the Director of the Denver institute and esteemed member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and at that time either the sitting or past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association.  In this talk, she spoke about the fighting in the LA Institute.  She utilized her fists, banging together, as a model of the fighting in Los Angeles, how destructive it was, and how it must stop. Her fists banged together! I was chagrined.  Denver?  For this? I could bang my own fists in Los Angeles.  Those moments, however, were the end of my disappointment with the Denver meeting.

After that the attendees were given a tour of the Hospital used both as a psychiatric hospital and as the base of the Denver Institute.  I can’t remember the name of the man who took me on a tour.  He was a senior candidate.

(As a side note, one of the big issues in Los Angeles was who was and who wasn’t analyzable. The Kleinians’ view was that many more patients were analyzable than thought to be so by the Traditional group.  This issue was one of the many between the Kleinians and ‘Traditional Americans’. Therefore, as stated above, as a Kleinian, it became necessary to hide both the “very ill” patients and the Kleinian treatment they received, from the ‘Traditional Americans.’ Discovery of such by them was thought to lead to dire consequences.  This particular thought was probably true.)

On my tour in Denver I passed by a hospital room, peered in through a window in the door, and saw a patient in a locked, padded room.   This patient, additionally, was in a straight jacket and lying on the floor.  There was no furniture.  The Candidate volunteered that this was his patient.

I asked my escort what sort of treatment this patient was receiving.  Psycho-analysis was the answer. I was shocked.  “Do you have to hide this patient?”, I asked, although the physical arrangement of the hospital/institute would have made such ‘hiding’ impossible.  What did other analysts think of this case?  What about Dr. Flemming?  What did she think? He said that all of the analysts there were very supportive of him and his psycho-analytic treatment of this patient, as was his supervisor.  In Denver, they were analyzing patients that would make the “too ill” patients, according to the Traditional Americans being treated by Kleinians in Los Angeles, look like pictures of incredible mental health.

This issue of what we were arguing over in Los Angeles, analyzability, by comparison to Denver, was a joke.  Further, this woman was not the only very ill patient who was being analyzed at the Denver Institute.  “Did you have to lie to the American?” I asked.  “Would they agree that such an ill patient could be deemed analyzable?”  His answers were that “no”, he didn’t have to lie and “yes” the American had no trouble with this case.

I was both amazed and saddened.  The members and candidates didn’t fight, didn’t seem to be bothered by formulations of analyzability, or the formulations of different theoreticians in psycho-analysis.  To this day, I don’t know if they were simply victims of a loss of common sense, or that they understood more thoroughly than we in Los Angeles what analyzability meant.   The evidence pointed obviously to the latter. Most importantly, they worked together.  No “hidden” patients. No hidden treatments or interpretations.  Although I had long lamented the failure of the groups in the LA Institute to share their considerable knowledge and work together, here such a situation existed.  Apparently no lying about cases for starters.

(I should add that such a union was attempted in the 40’s by Anna Freud and Melanie Klein.  There was to be an Institute which had three parts: Freudian, Kleinian and Middle Group.  This never came to pass, apparently because both sides felt that they were so far apart that such a union would be useless. And, of course, there was the ongoing debate between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein over who was really the most Freudian. I find a great irony in this in that much of Klein’s work, although sometimes, in my view, put in a unique and difficult language, was both similar to and a clear development of the work of S. Freud. “Mourning and Melancholia” and the proceeding paper on Narcissism (Freud Standard Edition vol. X1V ) are examples. Klein’s contributions defining very early primitive defenses, the paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position were seminal. Her development of the concept of projective identification was crucial.  Although there were undoubtedly many more influences on Klein, it is difficult not to imagine her being heavily influenced by Freud, part of this influence being the above mentioned papers.  The analysis of adolescents must use the con-tributions of Freud, Klein and later Bion couldn’t be more relevant.  I should remind the reader that what I mean by the latter statement, is the appropriate use of the work of these great thinkers)

The last great benefit from this meeting for me was that I became a fast friend of Dr. Flemming.  During this Denver meeting I made an appointment with her to discuss what I had seen.  How could what I had seen exist?  And what about the American?  It was clear immediately that I could talk to her about each of these questions and I asked a great deal more.  We talked of the American, their standards, the fighting in Los Angeles, the apparent absence of fighting in Denver, etc.  She was a great person.

We wrote back to each other fairly frequently and talked on the phone occasionally.  I could talk to her about issues. I think one of the things that attracted me to her so much was that she was a revered member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and could and would talk about most anything and wasn’t constricted at all by the “isms” that littered the landscape.   If she were an example of the American, it clearly was different and better than I had believed.  I don’t know if she was.  Sadly, she died some years ago.

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