Psychoanalytic Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice

Reading Joseph D. Lichtenberg

Linda Gunsberg, Sandra Hershberg, Linda Gunsberg, Sandra Hershberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138906556
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135168643
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychoanalytic Theory, Research and Clinical Practice: Reading Joseph D. Lichtenberg explores both Lichtenberg's psychoanalytic theoretical contributions and innovations in clinical technique, and how these have influenced the work of other psychoanalysts and researchers. Lichtenberg's approach integrates a developmental perspective on the life cycle, self-psychology, attachment theory, and his theory of motivational systems.

The commentaries in this volume are divided into several sections. Section One is devoted to informal interviews with Lichtenberg that portray an account of the evolution of psychoanalysis through Lichtenberg's eyes interwoven with the development of his own psychoanalytic identity. Section Two celebrates the role of friendship within his psychoanalytic circle, and Section Three highlights his leadership role in the development of creative structures: the journal Psychoanalytic Inquiry; The Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (ICP&P) and its training programs; and the ongoing Creativity Seminar. Additional sections provide commentary by psychoanalysts and researchers which demonstrate Lichtenberg's theoretical and clinical impact on his colleagues.

Psychoanalytic Theory, Research and Clinical Practice provides an in-depth encounter with a major contributor to the psychoanalytic field. Engagement with the openness, flexibility, and inquiring spirit of Joseph D. Lichtenberg offers respect for and hope in the psychoanalytic process. This book is essential reading for psychoanalysts, mental health professionals, and graduate students interested in how theory, research and technique are creatively integrated by a renowned psychoanalytic clinician and teacher.

Part I
Up Close and Personal: The Evolution of a Creative Psychoanalyst

Introduction to Interviews with Joe

Linda Gunsberg, Ph.D.

The interviews with Joe and discussions with Charlotte took place over a long weekend, April 16–18, 2010, in Bethesda and Annapolis. Sandy and I worked for several months outlining the scope and questions for the interviews, and carefully considered approaches to interviewing. Everyone, including Joe, was nervous about what the interview material would reveal. We were surprised at various junctures to discover that certain experiences did not have the impact on Joe that we had imagined.

What emerged was a recognition on all our parts that this project was a serious one. Joe at times expressed his concern regarding why anyone would want to read all of this about him. Also, there was concern about if we got so “up close and personal,” what flaws and imperfections would be discovered.

All-in-all, it was a gratifying experience for each of us. For Sandy and myself, it was an unusual opportunity to get to know how the multifaceted dimensions of Joe fit together and to appreciate his humanity and humor even more. It was also an opportunity to envision a historical psychoanalytic journey through his eyes and experiences, embedded within his broader sweep of world history and a rich cultural context (Anice Jeffries, personal communication, Feb. 17, 2014).

1
Interview I

Friday Afternoon, April 16, 2010

Home Office, Bethesda, Maryland

LG:
Joe, Sandy and I have been looking forward to this. We have done a considerable amount of preparation. It has been a wonderful collaboration for us and we are hoping you like what we have done thus far. We’ve got some very favorable responses to the outline for the book and how we are going to put it together. Our book editor is very excited too. From his point of view, it is a very creative compilation of your work by including a lot about you – autobiographical material. So what we did was we came up with a number of questions. We do not feel any need to rush through it. Whatever amount of time you want to give to each question is fine. If we don’t finish up this weekend for some reason, we can make other dates to do this.

SH:
You will see as we go through we have divided up the questions in various sections to be able to have a multiplicity of ways of looking at you both in terms of your personal life and as an accomplished analyst, teacher, supervisor, writer, and editor.

JL:
Good. Sounds good to me.

SH:
Just to orient, we are going to ask some more general questions and then we are going to move into your own analytic experiences and the influences they have had on you (your three analyses) and then the self-analysis, from a more Kohutian perspective. We also would like to ask about your training analysis; your views on the process of psychoanalysis; your thinking regarding supervision; your perspectives on teaching; thoughts about your collaborations and how you work in collaboration; your role as an editor, and then moving more into your personal life.

How would you describe your psychoanalytic theoretical evolution?

JL:
I think I would have to start with saying when I was 15 years old and between high school and starting Johns Hopkins as an undergraduate, that summer I read most all of Freud’s introductory lectures which I think I found in the family library. I always had access to the Enoch Pratt library but I sort of think they were part of the family library. I also read through a lot of O’Neill’s plays and somehow or other the two together seemed to make a lot of sense since obviously O’Neill was using psychoanalytic concepts whether he always acknowledged it or not. He also had some personal treatment. It was sort of known that I was going to go to medical school because that was what in my family lore was my destiny. It also had to do with the idea that I was fulfilling my grandmother’s unrealized dream because she had wanted to go to medical school and she had actually audited some lectures at Hopkins medical school. In any case, as a 15-year-old I was not thinking that I was going to become a psychoanalyst. I was just thinking that I was going to go to college and probably go to medical school. That was about it.

As things worked out, after two plus calendar years of college, World War II was on and I joined the Navy and I was eventually, after numerous ups and downs in the Navy, a regular officer and was floating around in the Pacific with Gray’s Anatomy and somewhere along the line I was thinking – do I really want to go to medical school, or am I just accommodating a family dream? Is this my idea or what? So I reviewed other possibilities. I could be a businessman like my grandfather and make money, but I thought that would be pretty boring, or I could be a lawyer like my father. But having helped him with some briefs I didn’t like the looks of that. So it suddenly dawned on me, as often things do, where I just get an idea that comes in my head and it crystallizes and makes sense and there it is. So I had the idea – I know how I can be a doctor and not have to be a doctor. I can be a psychoanalyst. Which was like saying, I can put my personal desire and stamp on it. So knowing very little as to what that meant, but just having a kind of sense about it, a feel for it, I decided okay.

When the war was over and I went to medical school, I went to medical school with the clear and defined intention of becoming a psychoanalyst, still not knowing what it meant. Then we had courses in psychiatry. They didn’t interest me that much because they didn’t resonate with what I was interested in. In my second year of medical school, between the second and third year, I decided … you know it is all well and good to have this great fantasy of going into psychoanalysis and psychiatry … but I don’t know what I am talking about. I decided I had better find out. I mentioned this to my father and he said that he had a dear old friend from childhood named Isadore Tuerk who was then either the assistant superintendent or the superintendent of a state hospital. The state hospital had recently been written up as Maryland’s shame. But I went out with my father and met this gentleman, and Dr. Tuerk said, “Would you like to make rounds with me?” I said “okay” and we went to this building. When you walked into it, the stench hit you like a brick. This building had been built before the Civil War and was used during the Civil War as a general hospital for Yankee soldiers. Then it had been turned into a warehouse for chronic patients who were suspending themselves in every kind of catatonic pose anybody had ever seen or heard of in the worst of asylums. Patients were running up to Tuerk and screaming. It was a complete hell hole. Now I had been a naval officer and I assumed I am being hazed. This is a test. So I am not playing the game. He said, “You still want to do this?” I said, “sure.” So he hired me but said, “You are not going to work there. You are going to work in the hospital part of the hospital.” That summer and off and on for the next period of time, I worked there and got a feel for what it was. I met these old line psychiatrists who worked there.

In the meantime, in medical school my two best friends were Ernie Wolf and Jay Bisgyer, each of whom were going to go into internal medicine. I assume I had some mild influence on them. They would never agree to that. They would say Finesinger who was then an analyst who had come to teach influenced them and I think that’s perfectly true too. The three of us in the first year had followed my crazy inclination which was that I couldn’t stand the way things were taught. I thought things were taught very poorly. So I organized the three of us as faculty. We had eight members of the class who came and we had our own little medical school in my townhouse where I grew up in Baltimore. We became very close, Ernie, Jay, and I, by virtue of this sort of alliance from the very beginning in medical school. All the way through medical school I kept the goal to be a psychoanalyst.

At the same time as I started working at Spring Grove, I decided I will go into analysis. How I got to a young woman named Helen Arthur I do not remember how the referral was made. She had an office in a very nice building in downtown Baltimore. I would drive in every day and I started my analysis with her. I found her intelligent, warm, appropriate. She was neither seductive nor offputting. She was just to me a sensible person who knew something to do with people and I got on the couch and I started to free associate. At least what I thought was. A couple of things I remember … to make the broader point … my work with her certainly confirmed for me that this was something I wanted to do. Then I had to wait until I finished my internship and I think a couple of years of residency before I could apply. And then I applied to the Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute.

LG:
Did you leave college at mid-point in order to go into the Navy?

JL:
I had finished three and a half years of credits in two plus years. I went briefly to Swarthmore in the Navy V12 program, and Hopkins awarded me my degree. I had more than enough credits. I was one class away from being a history major. I was one class away from being an English major. Of course I had all the science I needed. But my areas of interest would take me into literature and history. At 17½ I knew a hell of a lot about history. I knew a fair amount about literature. I knew nothing yet really about music and art. All of that came later. But at 17½, it was enough.

SH:
… For now we are looking at the trajectory … how you view the theoretical evolution of your thinking.

JL:
My training in the Baltimore Institute was a clearly defined ego psychology approach with a reasonably solid historical sense of Freud’s early writing leading right up to ego psychology. The gods were Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein, and they had four disciples: Beres, Arlow, Brenner, and Wangh. These people came to the various institutes and said, not enough aggression in your curriculum. All the things I knew working with psychotic patients were influenced by Sullivan, Bowen, Searles, and Otto Will. They were all contemporaries. And they are all going one place. I could not put together the interpersonal and ego psychology approaches. I decided essentially to let it be but knew that something didn’t fit. I couldn’t always let it be. I had one classic exchange with Charlie Brenner. He came and I was a candidate and he gave a seminar for the candidates in which he was talking about schizophrenia. His theory with Arlow was that schizophrenia was oedipal conflicts, just worse. I said, “I would like to ask, given these experiences (this and this and this), how do you fit that into what you are saying?” He looked at me very hard and said, “Next question?” Well, I knew I was going to get a very bad report to the seniors in the institute. Before long I got known as a troublemaker, even though I tried so hard to be a good boy. I have always had this dilemma. I think in some hypothetical way I would have preferred to be a good boy, but I have never had any success being it.

LG:
What’s a good boy, and what is a troublemaker?

JL:
A troublemaker is someone who asks questions as I did. Who proposes answers that other people don’t particularly want to hear. So I have been what I would call a consumer of information from whatever … the Sullivanians, the early Freudians, middle Freudians, late Freudians, ego psychologists … and then the biggest body of later information, from infant studies. Having said that, I have been attempting all along the line to reconcile these differences, these things that don’t fit, to find some kind of way of making some sense. Testing it out against further information – neuroscience, anything and anywhere – to then try and see what kind of sense I can make without trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

When I learn something, I can learn it and I can teach it. So I became a very well-recognized teacher of ego psychology. And I wrote a series of papers that are based on ego psychology, but that moved it some. My papers on defense mechanisms used infant studies to talk about defenses. A lot of my early papers were used in teaching in institutes that were looking for people who knew about infant psychology. When Kernberg used to come here and talk “Kernbergian-Kleinian” I was the one who was put there to argue with him. When Grunberg came to argue against the idea that we didn’t have any proof, I also was put there to argue with him. I can take a stand within a particular argument because I think I can understand the argument. I don’t stand on my own ideas. I am perfectly willing to move from whatever idea I have if someone can show me a better one, or if I can figure out a better one.

LG:
But I think the important thing is you have intimately mastered the other arguments, and you therefore can see both views, integrate both views, and you don’t let go of the original view. It always stays with you.

SH:
Yes. It’s not so much that you are in opposition to it. It is that you are picking and choosing and thinking how is it clinically relevant.

JL:
Yes … I have a firm belief that anyone who came up with any of these ideas is as smart as I am. It is just that there are different ways to play with ideas. I am a great believer in the idea of playing with ideas and keeping them literally in play rather than concretizing. I am very against concretizing. When we get to Paul Ornstein – you know the metaphor he gave? This is a great metaphor he gave at a meeting. He said, you know these houses are big and you can have different occupants. I live in the center room of a house of self psychology, and there is one out there Lichtenberg – motivational systems, and there is Bob Stolorow out there with inter-subjectivity, and these guys in these other rooms make a lot of noise and it gives me a headache. I thought it was a lovely metaphor! He was dead right. Except that what he did not say was that there was a very comfortable conduit between Bob Stolorow and me so that the two outer rooms had a very nice intimate connection and were not in any kind of opposition [laughing]. So that gives you an idea. And even when I got to self psychology I said, my god this has got so much right to it. I also said, in order to place emphasis where it does, it leaves out a lot. What I want to do is stay with its main precept and then put in the concepts it is leaving out so it does not look like it is too narrowly focused to coordinate with a lot of other information.

LG:
Would it be fair to say when you play with ideas you do not really commit yourself to one way of looking at it? It ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• PART I Up Close and Personal: The Evolution of a Creative Psychoanalyst
• PART II Friendship
• PART III The Development of Creative Structures
• PART IV Professional, Artistic, and Familial Partnerships
• PART V Motivational Systems Theory
• PART VI Developmental Theory
• PART VII Attachment Research and Implications for Treatment
• PART VIII Clinical Papers
• PART IX Selected Contribution of Joseph D. Lichtenberg
• Notes on Contributors
• Name Index
• Subject Index