A Note on Four Psychoanalytical Biographies

I have been a tireless reader of biographies at least as far back as the seventh grade. Since the summer began, I've had a chance to read four biographical studies, none exhaustive, and each in most cases covering terrain I was at least moderately familiar with. But they were enjoyable nonetheless, each in their own way, and each also filled in some gaps in a welcome way, so I thought I'd offer a few notes on each in case others might wonder about the wisdom of picking any of these up.

I begin with Joel Kanter, ed., Face to Face with Children: The Life and Work of Clare Winnicott. I should confess two biases at the outset: first, anything with the word "Winnicott" in the title is invariably going to attract my attention. Second, Joel Kanter is one of the conveners of an international study group on psychosis that it has been my very great privilege and delight to be part of.

That said, this book fills a huge lacuna. Clare Winnicott's husband Donald Woods is of course world renowned. But her own life as a clinical social worker and writer has been largely left in his shadow, which is completely unjustifiable given the scope of her contributions in their own right--to say nothing of the huge and countless ways she helped her husband achieve so much. 

Kanter has assembled a worthy cast of people to write about her works, and has reprinted several of them which were originally published decades ago in obscure places. But the crowning glory of this book is the 90-page biography he writes at the outset, which is superb. Buy and read the book if only for that reason. 

I have been very interested in reading more of Sandor Ferenczi for some time, and recently stumbled across Sandor Ferenczi: Reconsidering Active Intervention by Martin Stanton. It is a unique book: in fact I would call it a prolegomenon to a proper scholarly biography. That diminishes Stanton's labours not a whit, and in fact he himself more than once says he is merely trying to lay out the parameters of what a full biography of Ferenczi needs to wrestle with. 

There are at least two significant gifts offered by this book. First, Stanton has performed a very great task by merely assembling a chronology of the Hungarian analyst's life, farcing into each entry not just significant events in Ferenczi's own life, but also significant developments in the wider psychoanalytical movement in the opening decades of the last century. Thus we see when and where Freud and Ferenczi first meet, and Jung and Ferenczi, and so on.

Second, he has put together thematically named chapters that introduce the reader to some of the concepts and practices unique to Ferenczi, with liberal quotations of his writings as well as reactions, where known, to his writings from Freud and Jones, Jung and Klein, and others.

Next up is Gérard Bléandonu's Wilfred Bion: His Life and Works. It is an odd book in some ways, starting with the fact that a French psychiatrist wrote the first biography of an English psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, which was then translated from French. As someone who, many years ago, worked in scholarly translation of works between French and English (dealing, at the time, with Canadian governmental policy on HIV/AIDS), I know what a vastly time-consuming and painstaking process it is. I also learned that it's generally inadvisable to translate from translations. 

Nevertheless, in a way not entirely dissimilar to the Ferenczi study noted above, Gérard Bléandonu has written a life that spends most of its time discussing Bion's texts. I would have welcomed more integration of the theoretical chapters with Bion's life, which seems very much confined to the introduction to the book. By the end of the book one does not feel that one has penetrated very far at all beneath the surface of Bion's life, which is perhaps how he wanted it. 

So I would not consider this the definitive study of Bion by any means, and once again wonder: is anyone working on such a biography? If I had time and money I'd gladly fly to England (and anywhere else!) to luxuriate in archives and private collections of letters and whatever else I could lay my hands on in order to write about Bion. (For some unanalyzed reason, I have long wanted to write a biography. I thought at one time I might do the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, but a new study of his life has just been published--once more first in French!) 

Finally we come to Brett Kahr, The Legacy of Winnicott: Essays on Infant and Child Mental Health. I picked this up not only because I respect Kahr and have enjoyed previous works of his, but for two other reasons at least: the inclusion of an interview with Winnicott conducted by no less a figure than Paul Roazen; and then a really compelling essay by Susie Orbach, "The False Self and the False Body." 

If you do not know Roazen's work, then you should. He bids fair, more than a decade after his death, to retain (to my mind at least) the post of doyen of historiographers of psychoanalysis, at least in the anglophone world. Several of his books have been utterly fascinating, not least his Freud and His Followers as well as Meeting Freud's Family. 

It was Roazen, if I recall correctly, who back in the 1960s discovered and published the then hugely scandalous fact that Freud had analyzed his own daughter Anna, which by that point almost everyone was at pains to conceal, not least since she didn't die until 1982. On the topic of Anna, I've read two biographies: the one by Robert Coles (which is workmanlike but all of his biographies tend to feel just a shade too beige in some ways) and the more comprehensive one by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, in an updated second edition from 2008.

I have known of Orbach's work for a while, but not read much. Still her essay in this collection is extremely valuable for its steely eyed critique of Winnicott's ideas of the true and false self. Orbach argues that too much of the reception and use of these ideas by and after Winnicott posit some kind of chasm (bad!) between them, on the one hand, or some kind of magical integration on the other (good!). But, she argues convincingly, we cannot and must not allow them to be seen as thus divided because in reality aspects of the true and false selves are always mixed up with each other. The therapeutic task thus becomes not a perfectionistic one (how very unWinnicottian!) whereby we totally separate or totally integrate the two, but rather an asking of the question: how ought they to be together, and what can be realistically disentangled and perhaps changed, and what cannot? 

In sum, each of these books was interesting, though none, admittedly, was as moving and fascinating as the last major biography I read, Gail Hornstein's lovely study of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (about which a few brief comments here though I really should go back and write more about her). 

Next up: I will likely shift away from psychoanalytical biographies for a bit as I've just ordered Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. I was tempted to do so after this highly entertaining (can one say that?) interview with the author here. 

In Praise of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann

Gail Hornstein's lovely biography of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann convinced me that I must also read the latter's Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy, which I have now profitably done. In reading this latter work, I had constantly to remind myself that it was written in the 1950s (she died in April 1957)! It was astonishing to me at every turn how much of contemporary practice and current concerns she anticipated and was already engaged in. I will say more about this later. Let us begin with To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World: the Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann for it is a moving, elegant, and gracious study of the life of someone who remains too little known even today. 

This biography, whose compelling title is Talmudic in origin, takes us to the beginnings of Fromm-Reichmann's life in Germany where we get some crucial insights into her early family dynamics that seem--so Hornstein suggests several times, and convincingly--to have played no small part in shaping her career choice and actual clinical practice. Fromm-Reichmann was the sort of person who seems almost effortlessly to have put the needs of others ahead of herself. 

After her move to America, she finds in Chestnut Lodge in Maryland what seems an almost Providential appointment so well suited for her unique gifts and limitations. It is hard, in reading of the uniquely free, creative, unrestrictive environment around the Lodge in the interwar and immediate postwar years, to restrain at least a touch of nostalgia for what seems a less straitened time before the orthodoxies of a strict Freudianism, or later a strict behaviorism and cognitive-behaviorism, set in. 

When I picked up Hornstein's biography I expected that Frieda's marriage to her very famous first (and only) husband, Erich Fromm, would occupy more of the stage than it does. At least in Hornstein's telling the marriage--much of it lived in different countries--seems to have come rather quietly to a relatively mutual and amicable end, and Frieda does not seem to have bothered herself with romantic partners again, though Erich of course did at least twice more. (Erich has been the subject of at least three biographies that I know of. I think the Lawrence Friedman one, The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love's Prophet, excellent.)

I cannot do justice to the rest of the Hornstein biography so I will not try here. Let me instead reiterate my warmest recommendation that you read it. You will not be disappointed. I know I will leave it on my shelf in order to be able to come back to its riches and delights at some point in the future. 

Let us now turn to Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy, which is--quite frankly--far better written than I expected. Fromm-Reichmann's style is not at all what is sometimes derided as Teutonic prose: leaden, verbose, impenetrable, abstruse. Quite the contrary: she is succinct (more so in the first half of the book, admittedly), cogent, and constantly supplying practical illustrations and applications based on her own long clinical career. 

In addition, while clearly downplaying her own personality and unique contributions, one nonetheless gains throughout the book a considerable glimpse into the person of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and it is an attractive one. In fact, several times I thought of Peter Rudnytsky's observation about another clear, practical, cogent, and wonderful clinician I admire hugely--viz., Nina Coltart, whom I discussed here at length. Of Coltart he noted that

In reading the work of a psychoanalytic author, there is one question that I think we should ask ourselves above all others: would I want to be in analysis with this person? Is this someone I would trust to probe the innermost recesses of my psyche and with whom I would be likely to have a genuinely therapeutic experience?

One feels something quite similar in reading about Fromm-Reichmann, and with Rudnytsky one can also answer these questions in the affirmative. 

It seems that much of her Principles reflects and retains her very considerable debts to, and her desire for expanding the insights of, Harry Stack Sullivan, which is no small thing for he is often confined to a footnote in recounting the history and intellectual development of psychoanalytic theory. In this regard, FFR and HSS alike rise and fall together. 

They are clearly yoked in this book, and by the end of its brief introduction it is clear that FFR is a strong proponent of HSS's interpersonal theory. Indeed, upon finishing her thoughts here mine immediately turned to Winnicott: "there's no such thing as a baby!" With DWW, HSS, and FFR, one could thus insist "there's no such thing as a solitary patient who does not come into one's consulting room trailing a long line of entanglements with parents, siblings, authority figures and others." And this patient's interpersonal challenges will, of course, show up in the transference and counter-transference. 

Anticipating by many decades the contemporary research that has shown, time and time again, how crucial the therapeutic alliance is to the success or failure of therapy, Fromm-Reichmann opens her book by insisting that "the first prerequisite for successful psychotherapy is...respect...[for] the mental patient" (xi). Such patients come, she notes, seeking not just insight, but also symptom relief and possibly personality change of some sort. 

FFR made her bones, as it were, and her name treating psychotics and schizophrenics especially. From this she makes a striking comparison I've not heard before but whose logic makes sense to me: When it comes to the question of dreams, she notes that they "and psychotic productions are actually analogous" (xiii). We will return to the question of dreams late in the book, noted below. 

If it was Yalom who made famous and widespread the recognition of the importance of paying attention to the here-and-now in the psychotherapeutic relationship, it was FFS who anticipated him by decades: already by p.4 of Principles she is insisting that we must pay serious and regular attention to "the reality of the actual experience between therapist and patient in its own right."

This takes us to her second chapter, explicitly focused on the role of the "doctor" in the therapeutic relationship. Here she issues a welcome and forthright reminder that no therapist or doctor worth his or her salt will be trying to impress a patient with his technical brilliance or intellectual prowess or theoretical genius, all of which she regards as displays of "irrational authority" (17) that will set therapy back, not advance it. (In a similar way and for similar reasons, at the end of the book, she stoutly insists that the doctor should not give advice for that infantilizes the patient.)

Much as I have more recently heard the great Adam Phillips regularly remind us (especially in his Unforbidden Pleasures), FFS was, in the 1950s, insisting that the therapist must resist "fantasies of omniscience" and illusions of "perfectionism" (18). This must go hand-in-hand with the humble admission of mistakes, which we now know, thanks to decades of research after her death, is a key part of sustaining and repairing the therapeutic alliance. (On the question of the alliance I have recently found Jeremy Safran's book Negotiating the Therapeutic Alliance: A Relational Treatment Guide very insightful and helpful.) Such admission of therapeutic mistakes, Fromm-Reichmann helpfully reminds us, really must be done "in a matter-of-fact and nonmasochistic manner" (20). Therapists, confessing missteps, do not need to lose control of their own masochism and turn themselves into penitential flagellants!

Chapter three is where I detected what I take to be the clearest and closest influence of her sometime husband, Erich Fromm. She notes here that the therapist must be free enough to stand above and at some remove from the pressures of conventional thinking and "authoritarian values" and their demands for obedient conformity. They must also help their patients do the same thing if that is what the patient wants. To do so, she continues a little later, requires in the therapist "mature love" based on "stable self-respect." 

Chapter V, "The Initial Interview," begins by reminding us (again, decades ahead of this becoming a commonplace!) that "psychotherapy is a mutual enterprise, if not a mutual adventure" (45). In other words, Fromm-Reichmann is quietly moving beyond what is often called the one-person psychology of classical analytic approaches into the two-person and inter-personal approaches that would not really become mainstream, at least in America, until forty years after her death. 

Again, in the 1950s FFR was ahead of the modern fixation on having goals for therapy, which she explicitly addresses a number of times. For her these seem to have been very important for she was operating--as a striking footnote on p.61 called me up short to see--in an era before the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association had been invented--much less ballooned to the massive thing it is today (about which its sometime editor, Allen Frances, has had some critical things to say in Saving Normal). Later (p.143) FFR notes the importance--which seems standard today--of regular review of treatment plans to avoid therapeutic drift. 

Returning, late in the book, to the topic of dreams Fromm-Reichmann again says several very useful and striking things, starting with: "Dreams are frequently used by the sleeper as a means of conveying something to the therapist which the patient has been incapable of conveying while awake" (163). More strongly still, she goes on to note that "the mental operations of the sleeper frequently excel in wisdom and insight those which he is capable of accomplishing while he is awake" (169). (I know this to be true from the very first dream I had back in the fall of 1994 immediately upon entering into psychoanalysis. Fromm-Reichmann, a little later, notes that you should always pay attention to the first dream in therapy for it often indicates the central struggle of the patient's life, and its theme will recur in therapy.)

She goes on, in the same practical and hands-on way she uses throughout the book, to offer an approach to dreams which very much accords with my own as both patient and therapist: the challenge of interpretation. Here she says that "the greatest source of help in this endeavor is the patient's own associations to his dreams." This, as an analysand, I found invariably helpful to decoding most--but not all--parts of dreams that would otherwise have been rather recondite in meaning. 

If there are--and frequently this is the case--parts of dreams that prove elusive to association and interpretation alike, she recommends a useful tip: have the patient tell the dream a second time, and this time, as therapist, pay very close attention to any alterations in the second re-telling for such alterations are very likely "deserving of the therapist's special attention." In the end, it is not necessary, she says, to interpret every detail of every dream. 

Overall, Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy holds up astonishingly well. Yes, the language (almost always "the doctor" or "the psychiatrist") is sometimes stilted and perhaps overly formal, and not all the details in her chapter on interpretation and its techniques would be widely practiced today. But overall a book that has now been in print for over sixty years remains fresh and challenging, reflective of the wisdom of an extraordinary woman whose therapeutic endeavors with some of psychiatry's sickest patients would prove redemptive indeed. Let that be counted unto her as righteousness, and may her memory continue to be blessed. 

Robert Abzug on Rollo May

It is always melancholy for me when I reach the end of an exceptionally good book, but my consolation is that if I leave it on my shelf long enough, I can come back to it again in a few years time and enjoy its riches anew. This I will do with a fascinating biography that was melancholy for me in a second way: it took me back to a time when there seemed to be a closer, richer relationship between psychology and theology (as well as existentialist philosophy) than obtains in most places today. 

That relationship was lived by Rollo May, whom I first encountered almost thirty years ago as an undergraduate in psychology with a strong interest in theology, especially in its mid-century existentialist manifestations which I had explored in the last year of high-school when a generous French teacher (who very much saw himself as a soixante-huitard and thus indulged his contempt for rules and routine) gave me the entire semester off from class provided I show up on the last day in June after having written him a final paper on existentialism. This I gladly did, and so availed myself of the opportunity to read a lot of Paul Tillich--in English--and then Sartre and Camus in French. 

The following year, as an undergraduate, I read at least one of May's books as I recall: Love and Will. (I also read Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology by his half-brother, the psychiatrist Gerald May.)

May is now the subject of Robert Abzug's brand new book, Psyche and Soul in America: The Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May (Oxford University Press, 2021), 432pp. 

I finished this biography about a month ago on a lovely early summer evening on my patio. It is superbly written and a real treat to read. Abzug has an extremely deft touch in knowing how much detail to give about May's fascinating life and how much contextualization the reader needs without in either case overwhelming one with an excess of details. One would expect no less of so seasoned a scholar who is now professor emeritus of history at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Following standard practice, I e-mailed Dr Abzug some questions and was delighted when he agreed to my request for an interview about his new book, His thoughts are below. 

AD: Tell us about your background

RA: I grew up in a suburb of NY City, went to Harvard as an undergraduate and then to Berkeley for graduate school, both degrees in history. I was raised and remain a reform Jew by belief and tradition, though of course writing about May (and before that about 19th-century Protestant reformers) deepened my sense of the power of Christian faith and influence.

AD: What led you to writing Psyche and Soul in America: the Spiritual Odyssey of Rollo May?

RA: I tell the story of meeting Rollo in the Preface of the book, but the short answer is 1) After having taken Erik Erikson’s course on the life-cycle in college, I began to have an increasing curiosity about psychology and psychotherapy, one that had already been reflected in my first two books but only as a non-jargony use of what I would call a psychological aesthetic. 

Also, while in graduate school, had taken an external seminar in the latest psychoanalytic developments at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. And, of course, being in the Bay Area between 1967-1977, I was in a culture awash with therapeutic visions of the world. That said, it was only the accident of meeting Rollo that I became interested in writing about May and, for that matter, seeing some of the history of psychotherapy and religion through the lens of his life. Of course, the experience of knowing him and his world of friends and concerns for the last eight years of his life proved richer than I could  have imagined.

AD: I first read May in the 90s as an undergrad in psychology who also had an interest in theology, especially the existentialists like Paul Tillich. Tell us a bit about the long-term and hugely important relationship Tillich and May had. 

RA: The early 1930s were key in setting May’s future. First, while still in Europe as a missionary teacher, he encountered, and I would say “converted,” to psychoanalysis by taking a seminar in Vienna with Alfred Adler. That put a certain shape on his spiritual quest but didn’t end it, and when he returned to the U.S. he enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in New York. 

Tillich meanwhile had just escaped arrest by the Nazis by being invited to teach at Union, which he started to do in 1934. He and Rollo met early on in that year, and it began a relationship that was intellectual, spiritual, deeply personal, and lasted for the rest of Tillich’s life (he died in 1965). That relationship is certainly a central theme of Psyche and Soul in America. The mentorship of Tillich for May is clear, but it was something of a two way street. That is best indicated by the fact that Hannah Tillich asked May to deliver the eulogy at his first burial in East Hampton, NY, where the Tillichs had a summer home, and his reburial at the park named in his honor in New Harmony, Indiana.  

AD: May was also influenced by Freud, Adler, and Rank. But Adler seems to have been especially important. Tell us a bit about his relationship to and influence upon May. 

RA: Paul Tillich and Alfred Adler came into May’s life at a crucial period in his life, where his spiritual searching needed greater guidance and inspiration. Adler certainly had a life-changing influence on May, giving him a new way of envisioning the world and the possibility of a new profession. 

But Adler died in 1937, only four years after May met him and aside from a few friendly and important encounters in New York, the two didn’t really have the same sort of relationship as May did with Tillich. Nonetheless Adler’s ideas formed a compelling basis for his exploration of Freud, Jung, and Rank. 

But May told me that in the end he found other first generation analysts and later American neo-Freudians like Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm more powerful than Adler in their sense of complexity of the human condition and intellectual reach.

AD: You note (p.54) that May for "remained all his life wedded to obsessive self-scrutiny." That certainly comes through in your biography down to the last years of his life. What lay behind such an obsession?

I was about to say, “that’s a question for his analyst,” but let me give you two answers. First of all, I think his sense of spiritual devotion, which as it developed was truly a relationship with Tillich’s “God beyond God,” one which a therapist might call, insufficiently, OCD, made him investigate and judge his every action. This compulsion was historically not unusual among what Max Weber called “religious virtuosi,” and May was certainly of that breed. 

But I think more important was that he had the genius to build a theory of therapy based in many ways on his somewhat perhaps narcissistic but very productive contemplation of self. In short, these ongoing themes that provoked incessant self-questioning were in fact the well from which he drew much of his best work.

 AD: Part of May's project, you write (p.114), was "marrying the insights of psychoanalysis with the eternal quests of religion in a manner meaningful to the modern reader." Given how popular his books were, it seems he was successful in this endeavor in one way, but I'm wondering in another way about the kind of reception his books received in the professional psychoanalytic community. Did you come across reviews of and reactions to his works by psychoanalysts, and if so can you give us an idea of what they were?

RA: From almost the beginning, he saw as his mission in life the spiritual counseling of individuals, whether in the first instance through religion and later through psychotherapy, but perhaps most of all by educating an interested public through his writings. This was true when he first started publishing books that implicitly or explicitly saw a crucial interaction between the spiritual and the therapeutic (The Art of Counseling of 1939 and The Springs of Creative Living from 1940), the latter being a main selection of the Religious Book Club. It remained true even after he shed the theological trappings of Protestantism for a spiritualized existentialism.

Much of the answer to your question about his impact on therapists and reviews of his books is as much the ever-changing nature of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis as it does with the specific contents of one May book or another.  

AD: In early 1940 or 1941, you write (p.135), May began an analysis with Erich Fromm. I've been re-reading Fromm for the last two years and amazed at how well some of his insights stand up three quarters of a century after his English-speaking debut. Tell us a bit about the influence of Fromm on May that you see.

Another very interesting question.

I think there was some influence, though some of the most important ideas about the world and culture were transformed in May’s work from neo-Marxist thought to existential thinking, for instance living in a culture where not so much through the transformation of society but rather the resistance of self an authentic sense of the world might emerge. 

Nonetheless, there can be no question that Fromm influenced May, especially in those early years of analysis before the post-tuberculosis restart of the analysis. And certainly, by reading Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, he got a new and materialist view of an idea that he was already familiar with from reading the late Victorians and conversing with Tillich: the notion that both faith and community had been in decay for some time and that these trends had deleterious effects on the ability of individuals to “be” themselves. In that general sense, May joined with Fromm and others of the postwar era—David Riesman, William H. Whyte, John Kenneth Galbraith, and others—each in their own way critiquing the conformity, consumerist values, and general weakening of individual autonomy.

AD: I sometimes wonder if the existentialist movement in theology and psychology alike has been largely left behind, but then you trace out the burgeoning relationship between an older Rollo May and a then-young and upcoming Irvin Yalom, who is still with us after an astonishingly prolific career. Tell us a bit about that influence of May on Yalom.

RA: As Irvin Yalom has said many times, it was his reading of May’s Existence (a collection of essays from European therapists) introducing an existential framework to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy that inspired him to follow a psychiatric and analytic path. Later, when they got to know each other, I believe each helped the other in imagining the possibilities of existential psychology. However, there were differences. Yalom was a doctor, taught at a prestigious university medical school, pioneered group psychotherapy, was a self-declared atheist, and was a successful novelist. Rollo May was many things but none of those. In short, while they came together on existentialism, their careers and commitments were strikingly different.

AD: May's relationship to Christianity waxed and waned over the decades--from being a pastor and preacher early on to falling away it seems and then to returning to attending church later in life as an Episcopalian (p.331). Where, in the end, do you see May's life in relationship to Christianity?

RA: I think it is fair to say that past the early 1950s, at which point the formal church was no longer part of his life, he nonetheless lived a life imbued with the values he gained within the Protestant church culture and retained an abstract but real sense of what he called “infinitude.” His attendance at the Episcopal church in Tiburon in the 1980s had more  

AD: For those new to May and wondering where to begin, do you have, say, your top three favorites of his writings? What would you recommend beginning with for those who want to discover May today?

RA: My top three for getting to know May’s work would be Man’s Search for Himself (1953), Love and Will (1969), and The Courage to Create (1975), which is short, fits creativity into a vision of society, and as usual is clearly and compellingly written. And I would also suggest reading May’s introductory chapters in Existence (1958), an edited introduction to the possibilities of merging psychotherapy with existential thought. These are marvelous explanations of the power of existentialism. I might add that since the book’s publication, I have received any number of emails, some quite lengthy attesting to the influence May’s ideas had on their lives, and the three I recommended were ones that most often came up in our exchanges.

AD: Having finished this biography, what are you at work on now--new works in the pipeline?

I am still catching my breath but have thought about a short book based upon some lectures I have given recently about the practice of spiritual life in America, both in and out of formal denominations and traditional ritual practice. One element I wish to explore is the impact of religious and cultural pluralism on individual and group spiritual practice.

AD: Sum up your hopes for the book, and who especially should read it.

RA: Most of all, I hope to restore Rollo May’s place in the history of public intellectual life and, indeed, allowing readers to grasp the significance of his work to contemporary society and thought and inspire to engage with his ideas. As a biographer, I have also tried to write as “intimate” a biography as the sources allowed in order to provide readers with an account of May’s life that conjoins the public and private, as well as the unconscious and conscious—that is, brings an understanding that the origins of significant public lives lie in unique and often less than ideal sojourns. 

As for a readership, my hope is that psychologists open to a broader view of their profession as well as all who in one way or another were affected by May’s writings would profit from it. Yet, I also hope that those too young to know of Rollo May first-hand but who are in need of a broader and deeper sense of life somehow find the book and seek out May’s own attempts to offer roads to a richer life.

Not Him Again! Biographies and Histories of Freud on his 165th Birthday

This blog began a year ago yesterday, on Freud's birthday. I had hoped to have this entry finished to post yesterday, but it has been an utterly exhausting academic year and in the press to finish grading this week and many other things, I was not able to finish this post.

But finally here--if anyone finds them useful--are some thoughts on Freud and psychoanalysis, and some book recommendations. I start with historical context, and then look at some of the biographies.

All this reading began thirty years ago when my outstanding gr. 12 English teacher gave us a crash course in Freud and Jung which, she said, we needed before reading that year's required novels from Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy. (Davies, we discovered, clutters up his novels with all kinds of especially Jungian references to archetypes and such things.) Thus began my introduction to psychodynamic thought, which I have ever after found invaluable not just in my intellectual work but also now in my clinical practice. 

I never hide my "bias" for psychoanalytic thought, but neither do I try to force it on others, either, for nobody likes a crusading busybody, least of all me. One of the best lessons it has given me is to beware of anyone who becomes a zealous convert to, and thus hidebound ideological proponent of, a particular tradition of thought and practice to the exclusion and denigration of others. 

The fact, as Paul Roazen and others have shown, that the history of psychoanalysis is not immune to such temptations in nowise undermines this gift which, at its best, it continues to offer. Roazen, in fact, is a good place to start for his books are not just very important and revealing in their own right, but also, taken together, form one of the first and, in my view, still the best broad consideration of the many historiographical issues posed by studying, e.g., Freud and his Followers, a great book I read alongside Meeting Freud's Family. Both books were able to talk, sometimes with unprecedented access and freedom, to surviving members of Freud's family, his inner circle, and some of his patients as well as analytic colleagues in that first generation around him. 

Roazen is also useful in his Freud: Political and Social Thought. Finally, in addition to the above-linked book on historiography, see also Roazen's fascinating Encountering Freud: The Politics and Histories of Psychoanalysis.

Historical Context:

Roazen's work can usefully be situated in a still-wider historical context, and two books do that extremely well. Both recognize that psychoanalysis did not develop in a vacuum, but instead in a particular context and moment which--as has been frequently noted--seems, in Freud's hands, to have been seen as a full-throated fin de siècle embrace of Enlightenment ideals about the triumph of "reason" over something called "religion" and other disordered human passions. 

Two very good books give this historical context and a very good critical analysis: the first is George Makari, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (Harper, 2008). He concentrates his focus on Vienna, but also moves outward as psychoanalysis expands into other centres such as Berlin and Budapest, and then London, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere.  

The second is Eli Zaretsky's Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis. (Zaretsky's more recent Political Freud: A History should also be consulted.) Here as elsewhere Zaretsky is an important historian of the political left and of the depredations of capitalism. In both of his books, he is aware of and gives greater emphasis than Makari does to the socially radical consequences of psychoanalytic thought (well captured in Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938 by Elizabeth Ann Danto) before it became captured by the North American medical establishment and bourgeoisie. 

More recently, we have Daniel José Gaztambide's exhilarating new book A People’s History of Psychoanalysis: from Freud to Liberation Psychology (Lexington, 2019). I interviewed him about this book at length here. I am happy to note that effective next week, his publisher is bringing out an affordable paperback edition of his book, so now you have no excuse not to order it!

Biography: 

It has become something of a commonplace that the first "authorized" biography of Freud, the three-volume effort by Ernest Jones (on whom see Brenda Maddox's fascinating and often amusing book Freud's Wizard: Ernest Jones and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis), traffics too much in hagiography. But when I found a used copy two summers ago and read it, I found that it was more critical in places than I was expecting. Jones was capable of taking more distance from his subject than many have suggested--even if, indubitably, he was also extremely anxious about and solicitous for the protection of Freud's family and reputation, which caused him to ignore or severely downplay some things. 

Peter Gay's biography, which I read as an undergraduate, has also been accused of being hagiographic. But it is still a well-researched and well-written biography by a first-rate historian (Gay held an endowed chair at Yale): Freud: A Life for Our Time. I would also recommend Gay's much shorter book Freud for Historians. 

I have read just about every book written by Adam Phillips and been deeply influenced by him. His mini-biography, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst is very good, but by design it only goes up to his fiftieth birthday in 1906.

For a full biography--and arguably the best one-volume treatment--I have referred people to Elisabeth Roudinesco Freud: In His Time and Ours. I would also recommend Roudinesco’s short but powerful book Why Psychoanalysis?

In Honour of D.W. Winnicott on the 50th Anniversary of His Death

Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the death of D.W. Winnicott. It seems with each passing year I find myself reading more of him, and benefiting in deeper ways from his many rich and often unusual insights. (I have an essay coming out this week that draws on him.) So I wanted to repost these reflections from last November so that we may continue to honour him in the best possible way: by reading him. 

Before you do that, you could do worse than to start here with this moving and fascinating reflection from his wife on how DWW understood death and wrote about the prospect of his own death. I have read it three times now and continue to learn different facets of him and of their marriage. His prayer "Oh God! May I be alive when I die" is one that repays careful reflection. (I will, in fact, have an essay about it coming out probably next month.) 

I recently noted an essay of D.W. Winnicott that I found very insightful. Now the BBC has published excerpts from various talks by, and about, Winnicott. It is a charming retrospective and will only take 10 minutes of your time. Have a listen here. 

I have not read all of Winnicott by any means, but my debts to him are noted in the above-linked piece and in other essays here (discussing his thrilling 1947 essay "Hate in the Counter-Transference") and here. 

For those who have the money and inclination, Oxford University Press recently published the entire opera omnia. 

For those who might find it useful, let me recommend a few individual books by and about him. There are many more, of course, but these are the ones I have read and in some cases re-read several times. 

For biographies, there are two I have read (and others I have not but hope to). The first is by Adam Phillips, titled simply Winnicott. It is one of Phillips' earliest publications, and is a relatively simple and straightforward book without some of the literary flourishes so common in his more recent books. 

The second is by Dodi Goldman, In Search of the Real: The Origins and Originality of D.W. Winnicott, published in 1989. It's somewhat more intellectually expansive than Phillips but generally complementary to his book. 

The Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute had a library sale a year or two back, and I was very glad to get my hands on Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis: Collected Papers. That is a very rich collection despite the somewhat off-putting title. 

Next to this, his Playing and Reality is perhaps one of his most noteworthy books.

Winnicott's Home Is Where We Start From is somewhat mixed, but there are some good essays in there. 

Additionally, I'm only part-way through Psycho-Analytic Explorations, but it has many good essays in it, especially those on the uses of silence.

Though a bit dated now, Judith Hughes' Reshaping the Psychoanalytic Domain: The Work of Melanie Klein, W.R.D. Fairbairn, and D.W. Winnicott is useful for the wider context, and for showing the very important relationships between all three who, each in their own way and also together, form so much of the British object-relations tradition. I am always happy to see Fairbairn get some attention after his decades of more or less solitary Scottish labours in Edinburgh, far from the London scene where Winnicott and so many others made their name. Fairbairn's early essay on schizoid personalities remains one of the most illuminating things I have read on that score. 

Finally, I have started, but not yet finished, Stephen Parker's Winnicott and Religion. So far it's rather good, though not earth-shattering. Winnicott seems to have been comfortable, in that rather vague and pragmatic British way, being part of the Church of England though he was not especially demonstrative of it, least of all in his writings. 

On this score, one final book on my list to read: Ann Belford Ulanov Finding Space: Winnicott, God, and Psychic Reality. I confess to never having heard of Ulanov (a New York-based Jungian analyst and academic) until almost exactly a year ago when I interviewed Pia Sophia Chaudhari about her recent and fascinating book, Dynamis of Healing:  You may read that interview here. 

Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man--Again: Erich Fromm

I'm working feverishly to get an essay done before month's end for a project at Cambridge University on the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, about which last year I published Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, which drew extensively on psychoanalytic thought.

For my current project I'm going beyond what I wrote last year thanks to a re-immersion in thought of Erich Fromm, to whom I will return again on this blog, but some of whose books I wanted to draw to your attention even now. I think he's perhaps more relevant than at any time since the 1940s when he made his breakout into the anglophone world. 

March 2020 passed--for obvious reasons--without much attention being given to the fact that it marked both the 120th anniversary of the birth, and the 40th anniversary of the death, of Erich Fromm (23 March 1900–18 March 1980). He was wildly popular for much of his life, his books regularly selling millions of copies and being read or quoted by popes and presidents and policy-makers, inter alia. If anyone demonstrated the sociopolitical uses of psychoanalytic thought, well beyond the consulting room, it was and is Fromm. 

Today what he may lack in popularity he more than makes up for in ongoing relevance, not least to the politics of these United States but also, as I will soon suggest elsewhere, the politics of the Catholic Church. In some ways we need to return to his thought now more than ever for his insights into the problems of power, authority, freedom, and submission remain perennially relevant. 

I bought his Escape from Freedom in the mid-1990s in a cramped used bookstore down the street from my psychoanalyst in Ottawa, where I was an undergraduate student in psychology at the time. That book, Fromm's first of many runaway best-sellers when it came out in 1941, has never left me, and within the past couple of years has come to inform my thinking more and more, aided in part by some similar themes in Adam Phillips. 

Like most of Fromm's books, Escape from Freedom was written in a rather loose, breezy, and, if you will, "popular" style, which goes some way to explaining why, as his most perceptive biographer Lawrence Friedman has shown, he was largely ignored at least by North American academics. 

But, says Friedman--who has been reading and writing about Fromm since the late 1950s--the 1941 book was and is “the deepest and most important of Fromm’s books.” 

I would not dissent from that, but only put in a bid to claim that his posthumously published 1981 book On Disobedience: Why Freedom Means Saying “No” to Power is a crucial, and more concrete, "second volume" if you will to the 1941 book. It is a very short book, but what it lacks in length it makes up for in more concrete and pointed insights, it seems to me, than those found in Escape from Freedom. 


In addition to these two books, I have for the first time just finished Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. It is an extremely wide-ranging book, but its sections on sadism and masochism are especially valuable. I will return to this S&M theme in the coming days with some further thoughts on Fromm and also on an outstanding collection, Essential Papers on Masochism, ed. Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly (NYU Press, 1995).