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Academy
for the Study of the
Psychoanalytic Arts
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Unfree Associations: Inside Psychoanalytic Institutes Introduction
•
Chapter
1 • Chapter 4: Fear and loathing in Los Angeles
(1) For Leo Rangell who arrived in Los Angeles in 1946 the year that the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (LAPSI) was founded, Los Angeles deserves more intense research than other places.2 'Southern California has always been more exciting and more disturbing than any other place I know. Perhaps the two go together. Ordinarily, a disturbed excitement should make for a very creative place. But places that are creative can become deserts when things go wrong. And things have gone wrong with us'.3 In Rangell's opinion, things went so wrong in Los Angeles because of the unique dramatis personae in Los Angeles.4 LAPSI had a disturbed history from its beginnings. In 1950 just four years after it was founded, the institute split, and subsequently again became badly polarised during the 1950s and 1960s. Under the guise of theoretical differences major political struggles developed between Freudians and followers of the 'English School' of Melanie Klein, as well as between LAPSI and the APsaA during the 1960s and 1970s. This fascinating and colourful history is marked by what one protagonist, Bernard Brandchaft, identified as 'two interwoven patterns: the development of ideas and the trajectory of scientific evolution, and the use of ideas for political, personal power purposes'.5 The story of LAPSI is peculiarly perplexing and mysterious. I found an especially evident 'Rashomon' quality in Los Angeles-psychoanalysts would give utterly divergent yet often enough internally consistent accounts of events. Added to this was very intense emotion about what had happened often decades before. Those seeking to understand the Los Angeles situation have rarely looked at the whole picture. Often the 'Freud-Klein troubles' of the 1960's and 1970's are not seen in terms of the preceding history. One protagonist, Leo Rangell made this point very well:
This chapter examines how many seemingly independent political events in LAPSI's political history can only be properly understood in the context of earlier events. Early history and the 1950 split Established in 1935 under the aegis of the Chicago and Topeka institutes, the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Study Group, was the first West Coast psychoanalytic organisation. For the ensuing decade the principal problem was the question of lay analysis given that a number of European émigré psychoanalysts working in Los Angeles either were not physicians or their European medical qualifications were not recognised in California. The APsaA's 1938 rule prohibiting membership of lay analysts in its societies made for a particularly difficult situation for these analysts. The significant number of important lay analysts in California (some were its leaders) were outraged at the rule change and defied it by continuing to admit lay analysts. Karl Menninger and Robert Knight from the Topeka Institute publicly exposed the Los Angeles Study Group for permitting lay analysis in 1939. Then, insisting that San Francisco could better enforce the ban in California than could Topeka, they encouraged 10 Californian medical analysts to form the first West Coast society in 1942, the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society. The APsaA agreed, and Topeka was released from its responsibility for California-and its lay analysts.7 While half of the Charter Members of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society came from San Francisco, Ernst Simmel from Los Angeles was elected as the first President. In 1934, A. A. Brill asked Simmel to come to Los Angeles to 'put it on the psychoanalytic map'. Simmel was co-founder of the Berlin Institute for Psychoanalysis and established the first psychoanalytic clinic in Berlin, Schloss Tegel.8 Room was left to establish a separate Los Angeles society which would be able to deal with the lay analysis issue as it saw fit.9 During the 1940s and into the early 1950s more than 25 psychoanalysts 'immigrated' from Topeka after being trained at the Menninger Clinic and the associated Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis.10 LAPSI had major conflicts from the time of its founding by Ernst Simmel, Ralph (Romi) Greenson and others in 1946-Greenson had just become the first graduate of a psychoanalytic institute on the West Coast.11 Together with Greenson the Viennese and German analysts dominated the institute. A violent ostensibly theoretical dispute resulted in many of the other analysts splitting off in 1950 to found a diverse group that was to become The Society for Psychoanalytic Medicine of Southern California. Franz Alexander, director of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, influenced many of the analysts there. The new group represented a more liberal counterpoint to the prevailing orthodoxy in LAPSI which on the other hand was unorthodox in including almost all the European lay analysts. By naming itself 'The Society for Psychoanalytic Medicine of Southern California', the new institute signalled its difference and distance from LAPSI which harboured lay analysts.12 A 'power vacuum' was left by the early death of Otto Fenichel shortly before LAPSI was officially founded and the death of Ernst Simmel the following year.13 The LAPSI atmosphere was then, according to Leo Rangell, 'rife for something to happen'. In this era, the APsaA allowed splits-the New York-Columbia, Baltimore-Washington and Philadelphia splits just preceded the 1950 Los Angeles split.14 Ideological and personal reasons led to the 1950 split. Franz Alexander's ideas greatly influenced a number of analysts, particularly Alexander and French's 1946 volume, Psychoanalytic therapy: principles and application.15 This book introduced considerable modifications in psychoanalytic therapy techniques: flexible techniques involving changing tack to fit the needs of the moment, and the 'corrective emotional experience' which involved the therapist compensating for what the patient lacked in childhood. There was a major struggle between those who saw these ideas as attacking the very essence of psychoanalysis and those who vehemently denied this. However, the new group, some of whom had trained at the Chicago Institute, adopted a different approach. They felt they could have lived with the ideological differences were it not for what they perceived to be the other group's authoritarian and doctrinaire attitudes which they felt made scientific inquiry impossible.16 One leading analyst, May Romm, considered that there was a significant division between the American trained physicians and the European, mainly lay analysts: The Americans, she felt, 'were treated as interlopers and completely ignored... It became obvious that those of us who were trained in the USA were considered by those who were trained in Europe as being of inferior quality and beneath their notice'.17 One side consisted of 'orthodox' European analysts, including lay analysts whose patron saints were Sigmund and Anna Freud. On the other side were 'modern' or 'contemporary' medically qualified American analysts whose patron saint was Alexander who experimented with three times a week psychoanalysis and group therapy.18 While accepting Freud's cardinal concepts,19 the membership of the new group was theoretically diverse. However, according to Judd Marmor, a member of this group, most 'shared strong convictions about the issues of academic freedom and the importance of a medical background in psychoanalysis'.20 From its inception, training practitioners was far more important for LAPSI than understanding and researching psychoanalytic theory.21 The major differences between the classical group and the new group influenced by Alexander were over training issues, questions so often found at the heart of disputes within psychoanalytic institutes. The new group was viewed as minimising the distinctions between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy,22 and was accused of 'sloppy' teaching by the classical group.23 Those influenced by Alexander were in favour of fewer hours per week for a training analysis. Romm's Technique Seminar 'brought it to a head', Greenson recalled. He recollected her saying
Greenson remembered that everything was decided by a close vote and that 'every society meeting was charged with such fervour and such hostility. We were always so afraid of doing anything that would hurt our stand. We were so bitter, vitriolic'. Taking candidates became crucial because 'building up a dynasty for yourself' was dependent on it. 'We had terrible battles, it became untenable. It was just impossible to work; we were upset all the time and our candidates were upset all the time.24 Leonard Rosengarten, who was active in the Los Angeles Institute from 1950, summed up the differing perceptions: 'The old group saw the new group as heretical and a threat to classical analytic training. The new group viewed the old group as intolerant, stultifying and as a threat to academic freedom'.25 The increasing polarisation had virtually led to administrative and institutional paralysis26 and LAPSI was headed for a split. The Education Committee, consisting of the training analysts, was almost evenly divided between the old group and the new group.27 Both sides agreed to split and a bargain was struck so that a new group could be affiliated with the APsaA. Both groups would agree to the appointment of an extra training analyst on their side so that the new group could have a fourth training analyst to fulfil the APsaA's minimum requirement of four training analysts for forming a new institute. Carel van der Heide was appointed for the original group while Norman Levy was appointed for the new group. The formal split was announced on February 16, 1950, and the Southern California Institute was admitted to the APsaA on April 30.28 Since the Southern California Institute was admitted as a constituent society of the APsaA, the APsaA could not have viewed the new group as having given up the basic tenets of psychoanalysis.29 With three notable exceptions, candidates demonstrated the power of their emotional attachments to their training analysts by joining the institute their training analyst joined. Rangell was one of three candidates of Martin Grotjahn's who did not follow him into the Southern California Institute. 'But', Greenson later laughingly remarked, 'none of ours ever went to theirs. I don't know whether that was such a bargain. There were some I think I would have liked to give them'.30 **** (2) 1950-64 When Leo Rangell arrived in Los Angeles in 1946, he felt that psychoanalysis seemed ideal. Psychoanalysis was then, according to Rangell, 'as golden as the Southern California sun'. The treatment of the war neuroses together with the arrival of the European analysts who had fled Hitler advanced psychoanalysis, attracting much professional and popular interest. While LAPSI had become almost paralysed in the late 1940s, the period following the split became for some a 'golden age' for psychoanalysis'. Both societies expanded and graduates quickly developed full analytic practices.31 Mel Mandel who began training at LAPSI in 1952 recalled that the animosity between the societies 'was as thick as a heavy fog'.32 Still, within LAPSI the 1950s provided some 'periods of quiescence'.33 By the early 1960s, the 'golden age' was over. The LAPSI Education Committee was again divided into entrenched blocs which prevented the appointment of new training analysts. This time the polarisation was between supporters of Ralph Greenson and of Leo Rangell. According to Ivan McGuire, a member of the Education Committee during much of this period and who along with Carel van der Heide, had developed the LAPSI curriculum, that committee was 'tight and in-bred and in-grown'.34 Heiman van Dam who, as a representative of the Committee of Child Analysis, reluctantly attended Education Committee meetings over this period, described the meetings as 'unbelievably disturbing. The passions, the concerns and the personal attacks of the members of the Education Committee on each other were unbelievable'. What van Dam remembered as the 'terrible amount of fighting' between members grouped around Greenson and those around Rangell was related to a number of factors:
These intense interfactional struggles had reached their zenith by 1964. As one of the younger analysts allowed to attend meetings, Norman Atkins remembered being shocked when he saw 'the disintegration of our Education Committee in 1964-65. It was irrational, emotional, violent. They stood on chairs screaming at each other'.36 1964 also saw an APsaA Site Visit to LAPSI. While praising the level of teaching, the site visitors voiced great concern about the severe problems in Los Angeles that remained-'the destructive relationship which existed among members of the institute'. The site visitors noted,
The site visitors referred to 'malicious gossiping about each other by older analysts at social gatherings. This malicious backbiting is done in the presence of lay people as well as young analysts'. This exerted a deleterious effect on the image of the profession, particularly on 'young' psychoanalysts and students. The Report continued:
Active in the institute between 1950 and 1977, Leonard Rosengarten concurred with the site visitors' estimate: 'There was something unprofessional and unanalytic about the period-about the analysts' personal conduct-because they were so angry with each other. They were indiscreet'. However, despite their criticisms, the site visitors did not want any major changes instituted. One of the site visitors even suggested to Rosengarten that a few of the younger people who were complaining that they were not able to teach could be 'given a sop' by being appointed to the faculty.38 Some of the Site Committee's misgivings had been expressed earlier by others who lamented the lack of encouragement of younger members to give papers, or even discuss them at meetings. The 'give and take' so characteristic of the pioneering pre-war days was now absent.39 For Ivan McGuire, psychoanalysis had become 'more like a religious cult than a scientific body'. He described the widespread feeling of 'repression and lack of freedom' in LAPSI:
McGuire recollected that if candidates expressed views that did not coincide with their training analyst, they would be 'rebuked for it, censured. They would get the idea that they should not entertain such ideas and should write the cases up in an acceptable way'.41 During this period, training analysts were required to report to the Education Committee on the progress of the training analysis-LAPSI would become the first nonreporting institute in the APsaA in 1967.42 Otto Kernberg's observations about the 'devastating effect on the "quality of life"' of a pervasive paranoid atmosphere in institutes are applicable here. This atmosphere is connected with the fact that candidates feel severely inhibited from openly expressing their views when their training analysts are present at the same meetings.43 Kernberg further described institutes marked by a
Such descriptions are applicable to LAPSI from the 1950s at least into the 1960s. Further reasons for LAPSI's problems resulted from the time around the 1950 split. The small number of analysts in the early 1940s and the subsequent deaths of the most important of these, Fenichel and Simmel made for difficulties. This was especially true since they needed to train the large post-war influx of candidates. Just before the split, there were 67 candidates45 and eight training analysts.46 LAPSI was, in Greenson's words, 'flooded with candidates'.47 Moreover, as Atkins observed, because a number of training analysts were appointed by each group simply as a means to bolster itself, when the split occurred 'neither group was left with adequate enough experienced training analysts which is really where a lot of troubles started'. In the 1950 split both groups appointed insufficiently experienced training analysts to form an Education Committee to have an institute that could be part of the APsaA. Thus, the Education Committee problems pointed out by the 1964 site visitors may have had their roots in the political appointments of the late forties and early fifties. Atkins argued that this 'provided the organisational soil for the emergence of self-proclaimed super-analysts'. If LAPSI had remained as one group incorporating the best of both sides, the position of 'superanalysts' who ruled in both institutes (Greenson and Rangell in LAPSI, and May Romm and Judd Marmor in the Southern California Institute) might not have emerged.48 So the loss of leaders (particularly of Fenichel who had been able to contain dissent) together with the fact that already scarce resources were cut in two by the split, produced deleterious effects on LAPSI.49 Moreover, as Bernard Brandchaft maintained, there was continuity in the group dynamics that began with the first split:
The passionate declarations of the 1950s and 1960s centred on personalities, the divisions between the two real leaders of LAPSI Greenson and Rangell. The Education Committee was divided about equally between adherents of each leader, and promotions to training analyst status were stymied for a decade because each side would block the other's candidates. Besides, the problems were apparently not just within the Education Committee but between the Education Committee and the membership. The 1964 site visitors had heard complaints from administrative officers and members 'that there is no communication between the executive branch and the membership at large'.51 Impropriety in the conduct of training further disturbed the institute ambience. Symptomatic was the case of a long-standing member of the Education Committee who had deteriorated demanding prescriptions from his candidates for Nembutals, sedatives and narcotics. Norman Atkins recalled,
This period in the history of LAPSI is a particularly important basis for understanding much of the framework within which the 'Freud-Klein troubles' occurred during the later 1960s into the 1970s. If the matter is viewed historically, the springboard for the dissatisfactions with the mainstream theories did not lie with whatever faults the theories may have had. Rather, a displacement took place whereby the wrongdoings of the training analysts were transferred, as Leo Rangell argued, onto the faults of the theories. The theory was blamed instead of the corrupt situation.53 Ralph Greenson and Leo Rangell After the 1950 split, both Leo Rangell and Ralph Greenson were unequalled as international psychoanalytic figures in Los Angeles. However, Greenson was LAPSI's most controversial figure. The author of a classic clinical textbook, The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis (1967) and over sixty papers and articles. Greenson was unusual in moving outside the ambit of his analytic colleagues to give many public lectures.54 His psychoanalytic interests were wide-ranging. He was most concerned that analysts with different theoretical approaches seemed to talk at each other.55 He was famous-now even infamous-as being Marilyn Monroe's analyst. Upon graduating as an analyst, Greenson quickly became a major influence in the Los Angeles psychoanalytic scene. He soon became an important figure nationally and later internationally and was active in psychoanalysis until his death in 1979. Born in Brooklyn in 1910 as Romeo Samuel Greenschpoon, Greenson was one of a set of fraternal twins (his twin was rather infelicitously named Juliet). From childhood on Juliet excelled at music and became a famous concert pianist-Romi both admired and resented her achievement. According to research by Donald Spoto, 'Her applause, recognition, public acclaim and admiration created an acute sibling rivalry and weighed heavily on him'.56 This may have accounted for Greenson's undoubted zest for showmanship, his eagerness for applause and his Hollywood involvements.57 Unable to excel at the violin, Greenson followed his father's route into medicine. He undertook pre-med work at Columbia University and, completed his medical degree in Bern, Switzerland as quotas were placed on Jewish students in New York in that era. He interned in Los Angeles at Cedars of Lebanon and then travelled to Vienna where he trained with the psychiatrist William Stekel for nine months. Upon returning to Los Angeles, he quickly found that Stekel's technique did not work well with patients and commenced analytic training with Otto Fenichel, graduating as an analyst in 1942.58 After graduating, Greenson joined the Army Air Corps and was stationed at Yuma, Arizona. There he became interested in war neuroses and used sodium pentathol for interviews. Transferred to Fort Logan, Colorado, he continued his work at a hospital for the rehabilitation of those suffering from war neuroses-this was where he first met Rangell.59 Leo Rosten based his novel, Captain Newman M.D. (1961) on Captain Greenson. Indeed, Greenson received twelve and half- percent royalties from the film version which starred Gregory Peck.60 In 1947, Ernst Simmel appointed Greenson as a training analyst.61 After the split Greenson became president of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society (1951-53) and Dean of Education (1957-61). He was Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA Medical School. Whatever his official positions he wielded a good deal of power and influence within LAPSI. Greenson was nationally and internationally well known not only for his numerous psychoanalytic writings but also for his real flair for lecturing and teaching. His institute seminars were especially highly regarded at LAPSI. Hilda Rollman-Branch felt that although Greenson was 'a character' and 'narcissistic', his tactlessness could be forgiven because of 'his enthusiasm and inspiration. He was without a doubt the best teacher of psychoanalysis any of us have ever had'.62 For all that, there were those who saw him as shallow.63 Greenson greatly enjoyed public speaking. Rosengarten remembered Greenson giving 'a wonderful impression to the public. He was a wonderful speaker, spontaneous. He could listen to any paper, get up and comment on it. He was a little outlandish at times but very capable. He was able to attract people and he could get 20 men filled with patients.64 As psychoanalysis is based on private practice, a good source of referrals can be very influential. As James Grotstein pointed out, Greenson was 'very powerful not only because of his eloquence but also because he controlled referrals. He was an enormous referral source so a lot of people were dependent on him. He sorted the cards'.65 Several older lay analysts were especially beholden to him for referrals and the protection they needed as lay analysts. Greenson was a passionate man with strongly held views. Three analysts each reported to me that after a disagreement Greenson did not speak to them for years.66 He was given to irrational fits of anger.67 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud's biographer, aptly described Greenson as 'a hard-living man of passionate enthusiasm and even flamboyance, a man for whom psychoanalysis was... a way of life'.68 Supervised by Milton Wexler, Greenson shared offices with him for some years, and was greatly affected by Wexler's ideas about the importance of closeness between analyst and patient.69 Greenson moved nearer to Wexler's point of view about psychopathology, that it has more to do with developmental failure than conflict and had to be remedied with actual experience. Wexler gradually extended this view from schizophrenia to cover all psychopathology. Despite his textbook, Greenson considered himself as challenging classical psychoanalysis.70 He was hurt to be considered an agent of established classical analysis.71 However, Greenson was closely connected to Anna Freud and her group in London. His Foundation for Research in Psychoanalysis in Beverly Hills provided an important source of funds for Anna Freud's work in London as well as for Albert Solnit's New Haven group around the journal, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. The fund financed Anna Freud's purchase of Freud's London home and half of the Hampstead Clinic's 1968 budget shortfall of $60,000.72 The chief wealthy donor for this Foundation was one of Greenson's patients, Lita Annenberg Hazen.73 However, Greenson wielded his power within LAPSI unwisely. Had Greenson acted in a more cohesive way within LAPSI and backed this up with the money from the Foundation, perhaps there would not have been the general dissatisfactions that allowed the opportunity for the Kleinian and object relations influences to develop. Unfortunately, the Kleinian approach was not so successful because of its intrinsic worth but due to the needs created, as Atkins put it, by the 'wreckage' at LAPSI.74 As a contributor to psychoanalysis, Greenson was open to new ideas from many sources,75 but was not loath to claim them as his own. He even wrote about his own 'unconscious plagiarism' of other psychoanalytic thinkers.76 As a passionate, powerful, charismatic and forthright man with high visibility, he was the subject of many attributions including charges that he was under the domination of others such as Anna Freud or the New York leadership of the APsaA. While he had highly placed friends, Greenson's hubris rendered him in a sense incapable of being dominated by anybody else or by anybody else's ideas unless they became incorporated as his own. Leo Rangell, born in 1913 was twice President of the IPA (1971-75), twice president of the APsaA (1961, 1966) and three times president of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society (1956-58, 1964-5). Rangell is the author of more than 350 articles and several books.77 Rangell was a neurologist before beginning psychoanalytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. He completed his training at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute after arriving in Los Angeles in 1946. During World War II Rangell and Greenson were both stationed in Denver teaching psychodynamics to flight surgeons and treating traumatic neuroses of returned prisoners of war with sodium pentathol.78 Rangell and Fenichel met for a few days when Fenichel (who had been Greenson's analyst)79 visited Greenson in Denver, but Fenichel and Rangell never became close personally.80 Los Angeles psychoanalytic politics inspired Rangell's formulation in 1973 of 'The Syndrome of the Compromise of Integrity'81 with its emphasis upon the importance of the incorruptibility of the analyst.82 Rangell argued that while neuroses resulted from compromises between the ego and the id, the syndrome of the compromise of integrity was the result of the successful assault of the ego's narcissistic wishes on superego standards. As Rangell expressed it, 'Within each individual there's a three or four way conflict going on in which either he compromises his id and develops a paralyzed arm, or he compromises his superego and becomes a sociopath acting out, a character assassin of other people, or a crook with money or sex'.83 Referring to psychoanalytic life in general-and Los Angeles in particular-he asserted that psychoanalytic integrity was sacrificed when internal conflicts of interest were
Rangell held that such situations went beyond the manifest theoretical content of the disagreements and pointed towards underlying problems.85 While some theoretical affinity existed between Rangell and Greenson, behind the scenes there were major personality differences, rivalry and mutual criticisms. The sibling rivalry that was an especially important personal area for Romeo Greenson probably affected his feelings of rivalry with Leo Rangell. Rangell and Greenson were close contemporaries. They worked together during the War and were both actively involved with the same institute. Initially at least they were both of the same analytic persuasion. Both wrote prolifically and were the major Los Angeles figures recognised both nationally and internationally. The rivalry intensified as Rangell became more famous and achieved greater prestige as APsaA president while Greenson achieved neither national nor international official positions. He was scathing about Rangell's achievement of the IPA presidency.86 Rangell believed it imperative for analysts to focus on rational debate and discussion, on a charisma of ideas and not persons.87 As Rangell put it, 'Charisma is to be scrutinized, not followed. The effect that it produces in those it influences is regressive, not enhancing. The bond between the leader and the emotionally led is based on an unconscious identification'.88 According to James Grotstein, 'Rangell was the only one of the senior analysts who went anti-Kleinian and remained a gentleman'. However, Greenson behaved differently. 'Greenson was a stand-up comic who could insult the audience, make them feel terrible, he was formidable, there was a nasty twinge to him'.89 Greenson was the charismatic leader of a group under his control while Rangell declined such a status.90 Rangell's personal sensitiveness was insignificant beside Greenson's hubris. Rangell struggled against Greenson's excesses so tragically exemplified in Greenson's involvement with his patient, Marilyn Monroe. The approach Greenson recommended in his 1967 textbook could not have been further removed from his treatment of Marilyn Monroe between 1960 until her death in 1962. In his well-researched biography of Marilyn Monroe, Donald Spoto charged that Greenson 'betrayed every ethic and responsibility to his family, his profession and to Marilyn Monroe' and blamed Greenson for his 'egregious mishandling of his most famous patient'. There was, according to Spoto, a 'proprietary and grotesque control of patient by therapist'.91 Spoto asserted that Greenson was obsessed and grossly over-involved with Monroe, and may well have been negligent in relation to her death.92 However, this judgement is probably too harsh. Greenson's approach can be seen in terms of the experimental approaches of the time that were demonstrated to be misconceived only later. Since Greenson did not view Monroe as an analytic case, other approaches and parameters could be seen as legitimate and potentially valuable. The 'cutting edge' ideas of a generation ago may have appeared to vindicate Greenson's approach to treatment of such a difficult borderline patient.93 Besides, Greenson told his colleagues that he decided to offer his family as a substitute for the family Monroe never had because she would have killed herself sooner if he had committed her to mental hospital.94 However, as LAPSI's most powerful and favoured psychoanalytic leader for such an extensive period, Greenson's conduct had significant consequences for the contemporary and subsequent history of the organisation. However, Greenson's approach to Monroe did not take place in a vacuum. His close relationship with Wexler, Hollywood's then premier 'shrink to the stars', and the influence of Wexler's ideas upon him was important not only for his approach to treatment but shaped an important chapter in LAPSI's history.95 [The next section, 'The Wexler affair' has been deleted and is currently being revised] The LAPSI climate Perhaps the most important trigger for interest in other theoretical and clinical psychoanalytic perspectives in the 1960s was the climate of the institute. As Heiman van Dam explained,
With understandable exaggeration, van Dam considered that Los Angeles became
Those for whom analysis had not worked turned to other approaches such as the Kleinian or Fairbairnian approaches.118 Rangell argued that when analysts have experienced their analysis as inadequate, instead of blaming their analyst or the climate under which the analysis was conducted, they blame the theory under which the analysis and training were conducted. Obviously, this is a complex issue for there may be something profoundly wrong with that theory, and it is often hard to separate the theory from the person of the analyst.119 An old analytic saw has it that 'the first analysis is for the institute, the second is for yourself'. The training analyst plays a real role in the candidate's institute life and can act as a 'convoy' to safely guide and protect the candidate through his or her professional training at the institute120-or the training analyst can play a real role in opposing that progress. In either case, the candidate is beholden to the training analyst. Since the analyst plays a real role in the candidate's life, the analytic process is not as free (and therefore not as helpful) as ordinary analyses. As Rangell pointed out,
The problems as to how (or whether) an adequate analysis is possible in such circumstances need to be recognised rather than acted out. Especially during the period under discussion, candidates were very much in the power of their training analysts since their analysts reported on the progress of the analysis to the Education Committee-it was normally felt necessary to please their analyst which meant that important issues might never be analysed. The combination of the problems of the training analysis-especially where there is reporting and corruption-with the problems of the institute laid the ground for further analytic unrest in Los Angeles. The unrest was exacerbated in 1964 by the results of a study undertaken by the Committee on Psychoanalytic Practice which showed how little psychoanalysis was actually being done by LAPSI members. In addition to showing the disaffection members felt for the organisation, the study showed that relatively few analysts were conducting full analyses four or five times a week.122 With the dearth of analytic patients, some were taking cases that are more marginal for analysis which Leonard Rosengarten, who cochaired the committee, felt should not have been taken on as analytic cases. Some analysts were dissatisfied that the institute had not trained them to treat psychotics and that therefore they had an inadequate education. Much of the dissatisfaction related to the question of the appointment of training analysts. Training analyst status was attractive if only because a small number of training analysts each had a good analytic practice which included a significant number of candidates.123 However, the progression to training analyst status was being thwarted by the Education Committee. There was a significant push to open the institute, especially to make training analyst status reachable in a normal career path. In the context of the lack of analytic cases and the small chance of achieving training analyst status the attraction of the alternative perspectives of Klein and object relations was evident since they could help analysts work with a broader cohort of patients than the classical neurotics they had been trained to treat. Klein, for example, focused on primitive, paranoid and psychotic processes and Fairbairn concentrated on schizoid processes. All of these issues contributed to the dissatisfaction that led to the Reorganization of the Institute and Society in 1967 and the simultaneous appointment of sixteen training analysts. Meantime a pivotal development was looming. The Reorganization: 1964-67 Alongside the beginnings of the Kleinian development, during 1963 and 1964 various proposals to reform LAPSI had been made by the Dean, Lawrence Friedman, and other training analysts. All were shelved. Because it seemed impossible to bring about changes, Friedman resigned as Dean in 1965.124 At a party at Maimon Leavitt's house in the early summer of 1964 a group of younger analysts in their forties decided to do something about the difficulties and try to change the organisation.125 Arthur Ourieff recalled his part in it:
The group of four, which continued meeting at Leavitt's house, was extended to include Brandchaft, Rosengarten, Hilda Rollman-Branch and some others. Not wanting to be seen as a rump group, in Fall 1964 they asked that the group become an official committee of LAPSI. Chaired by Maimon Leavitt, the Joint Committee on Mutual Problems of the Society and Institute was appointed soon after. Leonard Rosengarten and Arthur Ourieff chaired a subcommittee to investigate the training school while Leavitt chaired a subcommittee to investigate the society.127 Two attorneys helped to draft the new bylaws: John Piggott, the head of the largest legal firm in Los Angeles, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, worked on the society, and Marvin Freeman, who was later to become a judge, worked on the institute.128 Marvin Freeman commented in 1974 on the situation at the time:
With the investigatory committees in place, Leavitt remembered, the years 1965-67 were spent talking about reorganising LAPSI more democratically. According to Leavitt,
Heiman van Dam who opposed the Reorganization predicted:
Greenson accepted the Reorganization but Rangell accepted it less well.132 The groundswell for change among the membership had succeeded. At the beginning of 1967 the institute (which was responsible for training and run by the Education Committee consisting of Training Analysts) directed by Jack Vatz and the society (the collegial and scientific arm of LAPSI run by the members) which was presided over by Maimon Leavitt adopted the new bylaws whereby the formerly separate institute and society were brought together as a single entity. The new bylaws were adopted by the society, as Leavitt recalled, 'by a favourable vote of 90%, unheard of in our organisations about anything, even adjournments at midnight. It was this consensus that convinced the Education Committee to relinquish its control and accede to the plan, as well as the merits of the plan itself.133 As Mandel put it,
In one of the many reports back to members that helped maintain their involvement, Leavitt replied to those who thought that the atmosphere, not the organisation, needed changing:
The new bylaws brought the institute, which used to have its own Board of Trustees, under the aegis of the Board of Directors of the society, making the institute responsible to the society.136 In Leavitt's words, the bylaws
The new Coordinating Council that replaced the old institute Education Committee had limited terms of office for senior positions so that people would not become entrenched in positions of power. The Council consisted of the director and the assistant director plus the chairs of six committees-Admissions, Candidates Evaluation Committee, Special Projects, Curriculum, Faculty and Child Analysis Committees.138 The Coordinating Council whose structure remains the same today consists of 36 members, each committee consisting of six members. It was not entrenched and static since younger members were involved and offices were often rotated around the membership.139 At that time the number of training analysts was increased by 16 simultaneous appointments, and the process of becoming a training analyst became relatively automatic after a graduate had performed adequately for a stipulated time on the teaching faculty, been a member for five years, and had become a member of the APsaA.140 Since appointment to training analyst status had relied so heavily on politics rather than merit, paranoia was bound to ensue. This was not a question of abolishing the position of training analyst as such but of according everyone the title. Since LAPSI's problems for decades were not only to do with the appointments or non-appointments of training analysts for political reasons as well as the clearly sensed corruption and inadequacy in analyses, the question of how merit was to be established was side-stepped in making training analyst status automatic. At the time, Ourieff was happy about the appointment of the new training analysts. Those appointed then included Mel Mandel, who was very influenced by object relations, as well as Kleinians Bail, Brandchaft and Grotstein. During the period of the Reorganization, Ourieff recalled that object relations work 'was in the background. It was healthy, object relations was my natural way of working'. He felt that he had been naive to have not been concerned about the growing strength of the object relations group.141 The bylaws established a 'rule of three' which meant that a training analyst could only analyse three candidates at a time.142 According to Rosengarten, who along with Ourieff was one of the devisors of the bylaws, this rule was framed 'because we wanted a distribution of candidates to many analysts'.143 That rule was often circumvented or honoured in the breach. The site visitors reported the case of a candidate, currently in analysis, who was told by his analyst that he had to wait for another candidate to terminate before his analysis could officially begin.144 There were reportedly instances where, in order to circumvent the rule, an analyst would tell the institute that the candidate had terminated when he had not-thus allowing the analyst another candidate.145 The 'rule of three' was not aimed against any particular theoretical group (such as the Kleinians who had little power in the institute in 1967) but to redress the prior oligarchic problems.146 What upset the APsaA, according to Rosengarten, was not so much the Kleinian development, nor the quality of teaching but LAPSI's simultaneous appointment of sixteen training analysts in 1967.147 This made 55 training analysts in all of whom 20 conducted supervisions and training analyses.148 Why was there such a large number of appointments? As Mandel argued, 'Since there were no training analysts appointed for a long time, all of us who qualified had to be appointed and the American had to go along with this. They didn't like it from the beginning'. In the 1970s the APsaA 'blamed the democratisation for our difficulties as well as the appointment of the training analysts. They thought and may still think that institutes should be absolutely independent and not at all subject to any oversight by the societies. All of them are the opposite to Boston and us'.149 Rosengarten contended that while the Reorganization received a good deal of criticism to do with the appointment of all the training analysts and an alleged drop in quality in teaching,
Mandel asserted, 'The Reorganization of 1965-67 was designed to contend with problems of the 1950s, and I think it succeeded'.151 However, while some important defects were remedied, many of those problems continued to play themselves out in what was to continue to be the very complex history of LAPSI. With the institute and society brought together more analysts were able to participate in teaching process, more training analysts were appointed and the institute was no longer controlled by an oligarchy. Leavitt wondered whether the changes might have been more effective
***** (3) The development of the Kleinian influence The Kleinian interest, which seemed to set the agenda for LAPSI in the 1970s, began much earlier. From the late 1950s the major development in theoretical and clinical interest in Los Angeles was the burgeoning appeal of the two British object relations schools of W. R. D. Fairbairn, and then far more importantly, Melanie Klein. Fairbairn's approach and its later development by D. W. Winnicott and Harry Guntrip together formed the British object relations school which has been a major preoccupation of the 'independent group' within the British Psychoanalytic Institute. This school has focused on providing a complete 'psychological' account of personality structure. Rather than postulating innate biological drives Fairbairn assumes that the child at birth was an energised pristine unitary ego which primarily seeks relationship. For Fairbairn, pleasure lies in the fulfilment of relationship and not the other way around. Personality depended on relationships with significant others, particularly in the first years. Special interest was devoted to the events of the first six months of life in which the most basic splits in the ego into a plurality of egos and internal objects in dynamic relationship takes place.153 Schizoid factors in the personality were the most deeply rooted, and very often, the psychopathological processes that begin afterwards serve as defences against them. In the 1940s Fairbairn, a Scottish psychoanalyst, propounded his new theory of object relations and argued against the pleasure principle as primary. Instead, pleasure was always a signpost to the object.154 Its influence outside the United Kingdom has been primarily through individuals. Only recently, has there been much general interest from the psychoanalytic community in the USA In contrast, Melanie Klein's ideas have inspired a major international psychoanalytic movement. Her work focused on very early experience and the importance of the early roots of the Oedipus complex. She introduced play material as a way of understanding the child's unconscious fantasy and recognised that analysis of the transference in child patients was as potent an instrument in understanding children's conflicts as it was in adults. She emphasised that the child brings two basic and conflicting drives into the world, love and hate, life and death. According to Klein, the way the baby tries to deal with this conflict is in the first instance by expelling the death drive into the outer world and later by attempting to integrate the two drives and tolerating the conflict in a lifelong struggle. Klein explored the role of the mother's breast and the nipple as the child's first reality and developed insight into primitive defences which are important to an understanding of the functioning of the inner world, particularly splitting, denial, introjective and projective identification. As opposed to Freud who thought that psychosis was entirely cut off from both normality and neurosis, Klein believed that psychotic mechanisms are present in everybody. She regarded the interpretation of infantile transference including the negative transference as central to the work of psychoanalysis.155 With the exception of some Los Angeles analysts, Melanie Klein's approach has until recently found few American supporters. To be labelled a 'Kleinian' in the U.S. has been, to quote a leading American psychoanalyst, 'an epithet rather than a description'.156 However, nearly half the membership of the IPA are Kleinians-the Kleinian approach is an accepted stream of teaching in British, Spanish, Swiss, French, Italian and Finnish psychoanalytic institutes, and predominates in most Latin American institutes affiliated with the IPA. According to Los Angeles analyst Morton Shane, some Americans objected to Klein's perspective because her postulate of the death instinct was seen to be atavistic. Her ideas about early development were seen as questionable because she attributed cognitive capacities to the infant which research deemed impossible. Moreover, her mode of interpretation seemed to circumvent defence analysis.157 Klein has been often dismissed in the US as id psychology. Robert Wallerstein recalled that no article of Klein's was assigned during his analytic training in Topeka-'She was regarded as a crazy woman'. Except for LAPSI, APsaA institutes do not currently teach Kleinian theory.158 However, many Kleinian ideas have been absorbed into American psychoanalysis by way of Kernberg's ideas, through child analysis, and through the use of her concepts of projective identification, splitting and envy without their origin being acknowledged.159 In 1956, Bernard Brandchaft sparked the first interest in Klein in Los Angeles among recent LAPSI graduates. Brandchaft became interested in Klein while he was treating a schizophrenic patient under the unsuccessful supervision of a classical analyst, Frances Deri. Since there was nobody in Los Angeles attempting to treat psychotic patients psychoanalytically, Brandchaft wondered whether there was anybody somewhere else who was currently treating psychotic patients so that he could get help with the patient.160 The first graduates' study group, composed of Bernard Brandchaft, Hilda Rollman-Branch, Gerald Aronson, Harvey Lewis and Melvin Mandel, was established. Brandchaft saw the group's purpose as increasing understanding of clinical phenomena and familiarising its members with a wider theoretical background. This reflected 'a common and widespread feeling; that there was more to psychoanalysis than we had as yet been able to experience'.161 After Brandchaft graduated in 1956, there were sporadic meetings before the group was properly organised in 1958. Brandchaft recalled,
A number of papers were either planned or delivered.162 As part of a 1959 panel moderated by Melvin Mandel and on behalf of that study group, Brandchaft made the first Kleinian theoretical presentation to an American psychoanalytic society to LAPSI.163 According to Brandchaft, 'The first reactions to this paper were not hostile, they were curious'. He experienced some responses as aloof, with many analysts feeling he needed to develop more clinical information to test it out.164 Brandchaft remembered no extreme reaction to a Kleinian perspective at the time. In his opinion, this reaction arose only later after repeated seminars and particularly after some visits by British Kleinians.165 However, Mandel's recollection was quite different: Greenson and Rangell had been 'fighting to get to the platform and Greenson saying, "I can't wait to take on Kleinian psychoanalysis". It frightened us'. The group never presented the second scheduled panel with Gerald Aronson and another member of the study group. The group members 'weren't about to put our heads on the chopping block as happened the first time'.166 Rosengarten remembered the group being treated 'rather poorly'-some not including Greenson believed that it was wrong to present Kleinian material before the society at all.167 Klein's ideas were not being taught at LAPSI. Bernard Bail recalled the only part of his training concerning Klein was a paper by Edward Glover which attacked her.168 Bail recollected being instrumental in forming a study group when he graduated from LAPSI in 1958. That group comprised Norman Atkins, Robert Stoller, William Horowitz and Marvin Berenson. This group, he asserted, was reformed into another group two years later.169 This group which Arthur Malin also claimed to have initiated contained Bernard Bail, Marvin Berenson and James Grotstein.170 A significant influence in the study of object relations during the 1950s and 1960s was Ivan McGuire who was classically trained in Detroit with Richard Sterba. McGuire was very interested in object relations and provided different ways of understanding patients. Greatly impressed by Fairbairn's early papers in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in the early 1940s McGuire began to talk about it in seminars and supervision in the early 1950s. McGuire remembered many responding as though he were blaspheming. McGuire was probably the first to teach Fairbairn but a few years went by before there was any significant interest in Fairbairn followed by interest in object relations.171 As McGuire generally supervised most of the young people undergoing training, he was the seminal supervisor for a whole generation.172 One of his analysands, Arthur Ourieff observed, 'Of the people who went into analysis with him, Casady, Aronson and I remained fairly attuned to the Freudian group whereas those who went into supervision with him were much more influenced by his thinking. He was the intellectual ferment, the one who was urging people on and encouraging them'.173 As a Freud scholar, McGuire influenced many LAPSI members to read Winnicott, Fairbairn and Klein as well. McGuire was later to turn against both Klein and Bion-Kleinian analyst Carolyn Hays, for example, told me that in supervision he had 'tried to talk me into abandoning anything to do with Klein'.174 With the growing interest in Klein, there was interest in hearing the British Kleinians. On the recommendation of the first Kleinian analyst to come to the U.S., Gwen Evans leading British Kleinian, Herbert Rosenfeld, came to visit Los Angeles in 1962. Bernard Brandchaft gathered a group to sponsor Rosenfeld which consisted of Carolyn Hays, Bernard Bail, Arthur Malin, Marvin Berenson, and James Grotstein together with Brandchaft. The first meeting with Rosenfeld, held at the home of John Lindon,175 was so full that some of the audience had to stand on the patio.176 McGuire, whom Brandchaft had invited to that meeting, was unfavourably impressed with Rosenfeld.177 McGuire regarded Rosenfeld as 'pretty autocratic. He made pronouncements like Moses receiving the tablets on the Mount. He had that character of stating something as the real, ultimate truth, stating as a fact what could not have been more than a speculation'.178 The manner in which people flocked around Rosenfeld at that lecture, treating him as a prophet enraged McGuire as he was trying to counteract ideology at LAPSI.179 No follower of groups, McGuire was alone.180 From that point McGuire's influence as a dissident in Los Angeles began to subside.181 Rosenfeld twice returned to Los Angeles. After the first meeting at Lindon's house, the interest was so great that the meetings were transferred to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel attracting around 60 students from 1962-67. Brandchaft invited Rosenfeld, Hanna Segal and Wilfred Bion to speak at these meetings and supervise.182 Opposition began to develop to the meetings not only because they were held outside the institute and therefore allegedly divisive but also because of their content.183 Brandchaft visited London for four to six weeks every year between 1962 and 1967 (when he spent seven months there) to find out more about psychoanalysis outside Los Angeles and the U.S. On his first and subsequent visits, Brandchaft interviewed a number of analysts there including Winnicott, Paula Heiman, Hanna Segal and Masud Khan.184 Frustrated by their training many LAPSI members, especially the younger ones, began to develop an interest in Melanie Klein and British object relations work. The 1964 Site Visiting Committee was struck by the presence of a group of young graduates who were studying the work of Melanie Klein. The committee's reaction was a harbinger of future troubles: 'Though they protested vigorously they were not becoming "Kleinians", it seemed a moot point to us', the committee declared. 'It seemed to us they are talented young men being allowed to withdraw from the stream of Freudian creativity'.185 (Note the assumption behind the term, 'withdraw' here-it is a moot point whether they were leaving Freud by investigating Klein). Why was Klein taken up so much in Los Angeles while Fairbairn was not? McGuire felt this was because of the British Kleinians who came out, especially Rosenfeld.
By 1965 the Kleinians had gained considerable sway at LAPSI, and had become in McGuire's view, 'like a crusade'. Many of those not involved felt 'disaffected, disenfranchised, like a jackass preying in the wilderness'. There seemed no way to contain the Kleinian surge. He was put off by the 'religious' quality of the adherents: 'The repressive atmosphere of the real orthodox and a crusade-the revealed truth of the Kleinians-was not conducive to any exchange of ideas. It deteriorated into recriminations, accusations, and indictments and became a struggle between God and the Devil, between the devil and Daniel Webster'. McGuire lost the close connection with the institute that he had for the preceding 15 years.187 In addition to the introduction of new ideas, something else was happening that needed considered, sceptical and careful study. The Rosenfeld visits with their development of followers occurred in an institute dominated by a group which was opposed to a significant Kleinian influence there. One who wielded a great deal of de facto power, Ralph Greenson, was particularly inimical to the Kleinian influence, although he had used certain Kleinian concepts himself. Those dissatisfied with mainstream ideas felt effectively forced to go outside LAPSI to pursue alternative perspectives. The Kleinian group was very active in bringing the British Kleinians, holding seminars, conducting supervisory sessions and addressing meetings. As Mel Mandel put it,
This was a harbinger of further trouble. On the one hand, it is clear why the Kleinians wanted their own training in the face of so much opposition in LAPSI. On the other hand, it is understandable why many LAPSI members were concerned about the extent of the Kleinian influence. However, given the APsaA's monopolistic position in psychoanalysis at the time, it is evident why the Kleinians wanted influence in LAPSI-LAPSI provided a way into IPA membership. (At that time anyone in the US who wished to become an IPA member needed to train through an affiliated institute of the APsaA. In Los Angeles, that meant either LAPSI or the Southern Californian Psychoanalytic Institute). Given the opposition to them, it is also clear why they had their own meetings and seminars, developing a new and self-contained analytic group within LAPSI.189 Different approaches are not generally allowed to coexist easily within psychoanalytic institutions-the British Psychoanalytic Institute with its three official streams is unusual and the result of an extensive history of intense and painful politicking. While LAPSI was most oligarchic and with two cliques continuously battling for power, those in power were unlikely to willingly move over to allow yet another group in. As the leader of the Kleinians in Los Angeles in the 1960s, Bernard Brandchaft was of seminal importance in the Kleinian development. Had he not lived in Los Angeles, the extensive interest in Klein would in all likelihood not have occurred.190 As Ourieff put it, Brandchaft took over from McGuire as the 'intellectual leader' of those analysts interested in object relations. Brandchaft was 'a very strong believer'.191 Wilfred Bion visited Los Angeles in spring, 1967 to lecture, and in January 1968, left London having accepted Brandchaft's invitation to live and work in Los Angeles.192 A major independent and original thinker in his own right Bion was strongly influenced by Klein. He was analysed by Klein and credited many of his findings and ideas as restatements and modifications of her work.193 Bion largely agreed to come to Los Angeles so as to have more time to write. Moreover, he thought he would be able to spend considerable time conducting psychoanalyses without being hampered by the inevitable committee work or administrative responsibilities he would have had in the British Psychoanalytic Society had he remained in London.194 Over 70 years old when he arrived in Los Angeles, Bion never became a member of LAPSI and avoided a direct part in the political situation in Los Angeles. He felt that many of attributions made about him in Los Angeles were, as he put it, 'wide of the mark'. In Los Angeles Bion feared being inappropriately ''thrust into the role of being a sort of messiah or deity' and did not want to be involved in disputes as to whether or not he was Kleinian or crazy.195 Although he was often revered, Bion did not seek a following. Bernard Bail found him 'always a modest man to the point of self-deprecation'.196 In 1979 Bion said that he planned to stay 'for a short space of time, I thought perhaps five years'197 but remained in Los Angeles until a few months before his death in 1980.198 Very soon after Bion arrived, Kleinian analyst, Albert Mason, came to Los Angeles from London. Mason had been originally invited by Brandchaft with the support of the Bails and Grotstein,199 and had been encouraged by Bion to go to Los Angeles.200 Although Mason was born in the U.S., his family migrated to London when he was a young child. He later trained in medicine in London and subsequently in the Kleinian stream at the British Institute for Psychoanalysis.201 When he joined LAPSI, he was the only Kleinian there with a Kleinian training. As a leading proponent of Klein, Mason's considerable lecturing, teaching and clinical skills were doubtless both envied and admired.202 Mason aroused interest and influenced quite a number of Los Angeles analysts through his analytic work and supervisions.203 In the early 1970s Mason had at least five analysts in analysis, at least 20 on and off in supervision, and conducted seminars of analysts. The fact that Mason wanted to be at the Center of activities at LAPSI created further antagonism-Mason's arrival more than Bion's posed a challenge to the Kleinian leadership at the time. Although an éminence grise, Bion had retired from politics while Mason twenty years younger was ripe for the fray. There was a demand for analysis and supervision that Bion and Mason could not meet. They attempted to find Kleinians who would come from London because it looked as though, as Mason put it, 'a bridgehead had been formed. That was why there was such a hostile counter-reaction'.204 Prominent British Kleinians-Herbert Rosenfeld, Hanna Segal, Hans Thorner, Betty Joseph and Donald Meltzer-were invited by the small but enthusiastic LAPSI Kleinian group, principally by Brandchaft, Bail and his then wife, Carolyn Hays, and Albert Mason. Bernard Bail, a training analyst who was one of the 16 appointed training analysts at the time of the 1967 Reorganization, became a central figure in the institute disputes. He was deeply influenced by Bion. Bail had received a Purple Heart as a bomber pilot in Europe during World War II. After the War he trained in medicine and undertook psychoanalytic training at LAPSI, graduating in 1958 and taught at LAPSI for the next 15 years.205 Both Bail and his then wife, Carolyn Hays, supported the visits of the British Kleinians to Los Angeles, organising lectures, supervisions and guarantees of costs.206 Bail continued was a leading figure in the Kleinian development and became the focal point of the disputes when he threatened a lawsuit after the institute suspended him from teaching in 1974. Together with Mason and others, Bail gathered together the material to protest to the IPA about discrimination against the Kleinians in LAPSI. One member of the group, James Grotstein was initially sceptical about Klein and Bion and sided with his analyst, Ivan McGuire, who opposed the Kleinians. Grotstein changed his mind when, after the termination of analysis with McGuire, Grotstein entered supervision and then analysis with Bion and supervision with Mason.207 Like Bail, Grotstein was appointed a training analyst in 1967 Reorganization. He was influential through his teaching residents at the UCLA Medical School. Though a friend of Bion, Bernard Brandchaft became increasingly distant from the Kleinians whom he had led during the 1960s. Brandchaft believed that he had underestimated the extent to which those in positions of authority would feel threatened. Brandchaft had thought that they would be interested in attempting to expand their understanding. 'I was also very upset about the response to the reaction and began to separate myself from the group of Kleinians even while agreeing with some of the basic principles she had put forward.208 Brandchaft subsequently became interested in self psychology and led a number of analysts out of the Kleinian group.209 While those in power were scarcely lacking in hubris, neither were the Kleinians. Brandchaft saw provocations from both sides, including himself. 'The Kleinians were making public criticisms of the work of everybody else'. A widely reported statement by Donald Meltzer, a visiting British Kleinian, was representative. He is said to have equated Kleinian analysis with contemporary psychoanalysis and classical analysis as belonging to the early part of the century. Brandchaft commented,
James Grotstein believed that the three leading Kleinians in the Los Angeles Institute, himself included, had been partly to blame for what happened. They were 'unreasonably obnoxious, certain, omnipotent: "We have the truth". I know I felt that. The trouble is I think we all did ourselves in. We were right but we were wrong'. Grotstein felt that with the exception of Albert Mason, the visiting British Kleinians made him 'feel like a naughty colonial'.211 In Grotstein's view,
A wide section of Los Angeles analysts viewed the Kleinians as arrogant and inflammatory. But were the British Kleinians any different from the American Kleinians? Hostility was no stranger to the British Kleinians. During the 1940s, they were engaged in major confrontations with the Freudians, particularly Anna Freud and her followers, over ideology and power to train. Were the American Kleinians still 'more royal than the king'? They seemed to be more stereotyped, austere and inflexible. Mandel maintained that many of the Kleinians practising in Los Angeles 'may have been practising in such forms that they were even more orthodox than the Kleinians in Britain. In addition, their style of practice aroused tremendous problems for those in the training institute here'. In Mandel's view, the Kleinians had not demonstrated their results sufficiently to many members of LAPSI. The known results appeared meagre-if the Kleinians' results were questionable, Mandel maintained, then the Kleinian technique might have no validity. Their view of Klein came by way of 'the results or the techniques claimed by the local Kleinians. Their argument wasn't with Klein internationally but the local Kleinians'.213 Morton Shane, a conservative analyst at that time, was struck by the militancy of the Kleinians. The Kleinians felt theirs to be a new, stronger and more powerful framework 'which stirred up resentment in those who felt the Freudian framework was powerful and shouldn't be challenged'. Shane was impressed with the sensitivity with which Bion and Segal worked with the transference.
While the Los Angeles Kleinians were no doubt scapegoated, the Kleinians also reacted very provocatively and became more strident as the polarisation continued. The polarisation resulted in a decreasing middle ground-the leaders of the institute were seen by many (the Kleinians included) as enemies of the Kleinians whom the leadership purportedly viewed as a threat to psychoanalysis. It would be mistaken, however, to see the Kleinians as of one hue. Brandchaft, for example, was generally well-regarded at LAPSI. He was personally friendly with a number of classical Freudians who, in Bernard Bail's recollection, 'looked upon his interest in Klein as Brandchaft's peculiarity'.215 Another Kleinian was regarded as very militant indeed, and was seen by many to consider mainstream people's practice to be not merely inadequate but not analytic at all. Understandably, this militancy on the part of a small number of Kleinian analysts and some candidates upset many non-Kleinians who felt strongly under attack. Many did not distinguish among the Kleinians and generalised the behaviour of some Kleinians to all of them. Mandel recalled the effects the polarisation between Kleinians and mainstream Freudians had on the teaching during the early 1970s:
However, others felt that the atmosphere was not as bad as Mandel described. Lee Shershow, a candidate between 1971 and 1975, remembered the classes as 'tense at times but not that bad' and believed that 'the "ghetto warfare" of classes may have applied a little earlier.217 Why this experienced difference? Perhaps the level of what was regarded as being 'unteachable' varied. Perhaps since the Kleinian-oriented analysts and candidates were the underdog, they may have viewed the situation more charitably, particularly in view of the fact that the charge that LAPSI had become unworkable was also levelled by the APsaA. Nevertheless, given the unrest, tensions and disputes everywhere else in LAPSI at the time, classes could not have been particularly congenial! Some of the problems related to what Arthur Ourieff, director of the institute (1973-76), thought were 'the negative aspect of the Reorganization'. LAPSI 'opened the choice of training analysis to the market place' which almost became an extension of the UCLA residency training program. For, according to Ourieff, James Grotstein (a 'very charismatic, very brilliant and very impressive person') became the most popular analytic teacher and together with Malin developed a coterie at UCLA that was 'very contagious'. The UCLA residents would then come to LAPSI, go into a Kleinian, Fairbairnian or Bionian analysis and attend seminars. 'It became horribly chaotic'. During that period, Brandchaft was beginning to separate himself from the Kleinians. Ourieff recalled that with the arrival of Mason and Bion LAPSI 'had a Red Army and White Army without any resolution'-the majority 'were still on the more conservative side. But the vocal and rebellious ones were on the other side. The teaching and the seminars just became impossible'. Aiming at excellence at LAPSI, Ourieff despaired that first year candidates became 'so radicalised by their analyses that there was no proper critical thinking going on'.218 With candidates polarised into camps, the ambience was characterised more by opposing religions than by deviant theories, a situation to which the site visitors could not fail to have reacted. Not knowing how to direct training in such a morass, Ourieff became 'almost frenzied'. Students were not
Why Klein received so much attention was not as the result of carefully
considered work but arose to fill the vacuum that was left by the extent of the
previous problems in LAPSI. Ten years later the vacuum would have been
filled-and was-by self psychology. Rather than help LAPSI's problems, APsaA
intervention would exacerbate them. The 1973 Site Visit 1973 was a fateful and tumultuous year for LAPSI and heralded three still more turbulent years. That year's APsaA site visit marked the beginning of the APsaA's involvement in what was until then largely a local matter. The Reorganization ameliorated LAPSI's problems but had not solved them. The ideological struggles were rapidly increasing. In February 1973 the APsaA's regular Site Visit Committee investigated the Los Angeles situation and was severely critical of everything they saw. That committee included some powerful APsaA members.220 The committee reported in October, 1973, finding that the Los Angeles Institute's method of appointing training analysts 'does not conform in spirit or custom to the standards and objectives shared by the other analytic institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association'.221 The 1973 Committee noted that the bad atmosphere in the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute was not only because of the current struggles between classical analysts, Fairbairnians and Kleinians.
The committee questioned
The later 'ideological' problems between classical Freudians and Kleinians should be seen as superimposed upon the earlier struggles between Freudians. Since the earlier struggles had caused quite outside the theoretical arena. Blaming the Kleinians for LAPSI's problems was simplistic and misleading. Issues surrounding the democratic Reorganization of the institute resulted from earlier struggles and the oligarchic nature of the institute. The Site Visit Committee chairman, Justin Krent, reportedly put it aptly when talking about whether the APsaA simply wanted to get rid of the Kleinians or other undesirable groups:
The director of the institute from 1971 to 1973, Maimon Leavitt, did not consider LAPSI to have had great problems over that period. He ensured that there was a fairly large Kleinian representation from LAPSI in the Site Visit interviews so that the site visitors would get an overall picture. However, Leavitt concluded that the site visitors were not really there to find an overall picture. That visit, Leavitt asserted, 'was more destructive than helpful. They came out on a witch-hunt'.225 The APsaA did not like the Kleinians gaining entrée into Southern California and, Leavitt maintained, the Reorganization was considered to be disruptive of the usually accepted authority structures. Taking power from training analysts and spreading it widely was a radical change at the time, as was the move to broaden and open up training analyst selection processes. In particular, Leavitt saw Justin Krent, as 'very damaging', 'unsympathetic to what was going on' and looking for trouble.226 Leavitt believed the Site Visit intensified LAPSI's troubles. Krent and Homer Curtis, two of the committee's strongest members, were conservative and, Leavitt thought, considered the activities at LAPSI to be anathema. Instead of addressing the ongoing conflict (which those in power in LAPSI at the time felt could have been capable of resolution within LAPSI itself), the site visitors condemned the institute as being incompetent and threatened action against it.227 The committee was appalled by what they saw to be the low calibre of the institute, the intensity of the internecine fighting, the confusion of the candidates and what they conceived to be the undue influence of the Kleinians over them, as well as by what they regarded as the deleterious results of the method of appointing training analysts. The institute was seen to be near paralysis. The committee felt that 'the most difficult problem facing the institute' was 'that the coexistence of the English schools with traditional analysis has confused the candidates and detracted from their training'. They also believed that LAPSI ought to find a means of selecting training analysts 'consistent with the aims and practices of other institutes' and that the institute ought to consider assigning analysts and supervisors to candidates instead of allowing candidates to choose them.228 Quite plausibly, Grotstein sensed that 'what really bugged the APsaA was that our Reorganization allowed any graduate member to become a training analyst after five years-without any especial qualification.'229 The site visitors found that the candidates were confused, did not have a proper grasp of any school of thought, and did not find the juxtaposition of theoretical orientations enriching. They observed one class session where there were co-instructors of different orientations and felt that this 'was neither a useful classroom exercise nor a scientific discussion but rather a forum for a politicised attack of one instructor upon the other'.230 The site visitors also noted that while 'it seemed impossible to do analytic teaching' a few years previously, 'this is no longer the case, but as a result many experienced, well-qualified analysts withdrew from teaching'.231 The site visitors' report lambasted almost every aspect of LAPSI. The administration had been hindered by the democratic Reorganization; routine administrative work was not accomplished;232 'the Coordinating Council does little in the way of evaluation or originating policy'; the framers of the bylaws had been 'so desirous of preventing abuse of power' that the Council 'was stripped of the authority it needed for effective functioning'; the Council did not perform the tasks of an Education Committee within the APsaA standards.233 The site visitors disliked the way the Candidates' Evaluation Committee functioned since the committee depended on the reports of a supervisor who had been picked by the candidate.234' The Admissions Committee accepted candidates 'without attempts at selectivity and discrimination generally found in other institutes'.235 As for the curriculum, candidates 'did not appear to be at the same level of training as their peers in other institutes. They seemed confused about many of the basic concepts of analysis, about the historical development of Freudian analysis, and were deficient in the more current areas of analytic thought'. This could be accounted for, they thought, by the fact that 'modern developments of classical analysis appear to have been inadequately taught or have not been given sufficient emphasis'. The candidates did not know important works by such authors as Anna Freud, Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein-'the single course on Ego Psychology is an elective'. The visitors saw the candidates' confusion by the way that Kleinian-leaning instructors would compare the early Freud with Klein 'as though Freud's later writings never existed' and they 'considered destructive the practice of having Freudian and Kleinian analysts co-instruct a course'. They asserted that the curriculum did not accord with its stated aim of teaching classical psychoanalysis nor did it accord with the APsaA guidelines which mandated that the curriculum be designed so that students 'gain an understanding of the fundamentals of psychoanalysis as developed by Freud and his co-workers'.236 The committee was most concerned about the effects of the Kleinians at LAPSI who had reanalyzed some of the faculty and a significant number of faculty families. The Kleinians influenced many of the applicants, and their involvement with residency programs helped interest residents in the direction of Kleinian analysis. The site visitors appeared to believe a highly inflated estimate that 'up to 75% of the candidates are pro-Kleinian'.237 LAPSI's stance on the appointment of training analysts was of special concern to the site visitors. The Reorganization made that status open to anybody who had graduated five years, had adequately performed as a teacher and was a member of the APsaA. The committee considered that the institute needed to intervene actively far more than this in assessing such factors as ability, interest, time devoted to analytic practice as well as 'the ability to understand the processes of psychic growth derived from an understanding of the maturation of ego and superego'. They added that most of the Coordinating Council members, across theoretical orientations, thought the process in place to be satisfactory. The committee believed that with all its pitfalls, the institute should select training analysts-the Coordinating Council was shelving their responsibility and leaving it up to the candidates. 'Because of the necessity for selecting their own training analysts, the candidates are in effect determining who shall train and who shall not'. The committee considered that LAPSI did 'not conform in spirit or in custom to the standards and objectives shared by the other analytic institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association'.238 The committee assailed the candidates' 'free choice policy' for supervisors and analysts239 as well as their courses and instructors.240 The site visitors cited analysts not active in administration who
The fact that 'the more traditional group' could be 'bewildered' by the leaders of LAPSI who felt that teaching 'more diverse theories' was intellectually beneficial indicated major educational problems. The site visitors maintained that in general, education had deteriorated since 1964 and 'the general atmosphere of the institute is not one conducive to classical analytic training'.242 The committee reached three major conclusions and recommendations. First, they regarded the most difficult problem to be 'the juxtaposition of different theoretical orientations' because it 'confused the candidates and detracted from their training'. Second, they recommended the implementation of 'a more appropriate means of selecting training analysts'. Third, they suggested that the institute 'consider the assignment of analysts and supervisors' instead of this occurring through the free choice of the candidates'.243 The use by the committee of terms such as 'confused', 'detracted' and 'appropriate means of selecting training analysts' indicate an orthodox, closed training model akin to the NYPsaI during that period. Of course, LAPSI reacted negatively. The committee challenged the goals of the Reorganization, especially around the fundamental issue of the appointment, role and function of training analysts. They wanted to reinstitute the authority of the institute as opposed to the society, remove the influence of the candidates on their education, and reinstitute evaluations for training analyst status, including the idea of re-evaluating all training analysts. Further, the committee wanted to reassert the dominance of mainstream ego psychology and virtually to eliminate the Kleinian influence. Quite understandably, Maimon Leavitt called the site visit report 'devastating'. The site visitors had 'accepted every complaint as indicative of widespread disaffection'.244 At a faculty meeting, Leavitt is minuted as having 'felt that the site visitors were quite biased in what they discovered and that we need to ask the site visitors what is rumor, what is reporting and what is observation in their findings'.245 But Leavitt noted a positive aspect: 'Even though I personally feel that the committee's distaste for our philosophy and policy implementation distorted their view of the quality of our education, nevertheless the report served the useful purpose of forcing us to a sober reconsideration of our situation'.246 The Site Visit Report was tantamount to a declaration of war by the APsaA on LAPSI-and the Kleinians. Three years later, the APsaA even sent a committee assigned the task of shutting LAPSI down. The struggles were inevitable given LAPSI's attack in the Reorganization on some of the fundamental ways that the APsaA viewed the nature of training and training institution and the appointment, role and function of training analysts. That there were influential Kleinian training analysts in place and Kleinian teachers made the situation still more explosive. The director, Arthur Ourieff, saw himself
Ourieff considered neither himself nor other 'conservative' Los Angeles analysts as 'traditional American psychoanalysts'. He was even open to an arrangement whereby there were different teaching streams as in the British Institute of Psychoanalysis. Ourieff was willing to have a Kleinian section from first year provided that the education would be intermingled at a later date. When Ourieff discussed the double track idea with the APsaA,
Since there was 'no way' the APsaA would accept the double track idea and no way to convince the Kleinians 'that the American wouldn't accept that', Ourieff was in a cleft stick as director. In December 1973, officials of the Los Angeles Institute met with a committee of the APsaA to discuss the report. While the APsaA's committee consisted of different people from those who had been on the investigating committee, it nonetheless backed up the Site Visit Committee's report. Any doubts as to whether the site visitors represented APsaA policy were removed. At that meeting the APsaA's reaffirmed that 'Kleinians' were to be eliminated from the faculty of the Los Angeles Institute and the combined committee of LAPSI and APsaA representatives decided to call themselves 'Traditional American Psychoanalysts' (TAP) to distinguish themselves from Kleinians.248 At the faculty meeting of January 9, 1974 Ourieff reported on meetings in New York with the Chairman of the APsaA's Board on Professional Standards and other senior officials of the APsaA as well as the Site Visit Committee. The APsaA officials suggested that LAPSI candidates
Ourieff then reported on a series of interim measures recommended by the Coordinating Council and LAPSI's internal Site Review Committee (consisting of the Coordinating Council plus three other LAPSI officers). On the suggestion of 'the people in New York' this committee recommended a moratorium on any changes so as to allow 'time to debate and come to grips with our problems'. The standby measures recommended in the meantime so that the institute would continue to function were the assigning of supervisors to candidates, a review of case selection and a freeze on new training analyses. The director and assistant director stated that the Site Review Committee and the Coordinating Council felt that all training and supervising analysts should be re-evaluated in terms of the APsaA's requirements-this would of course remove Kleinians from training, and finally as training analysts. The minutes of that institute meeting quoted Ourieff as stating:
APsaA officials later denied having told Ourieff what he reported. At a society meeting six days later Ourieff further reported on his meetings in New York and confirmed that the APsaA demanded firm changes in the institute if it was to remain within the APsaA. The Minutes of this faculty meeting state this about the APsaA's attitude:
The APsaA officials were concerned that LAPSI had cut the power of training analysts and maintained that changes in the selection of training analysts had led to the troubles. Ourieff asserted that a number of low calibre training analysts, who were appointed through the new procedures, became involved with the administration of the institute. Ourieff regarded the statement about 'incompetent analysts' and Kleinians as inflammatory but the APsaA directive was 'absolutely clear'. The APsaA officials were too astute to tell LAPSI directly to get rid of the Kleinians. Instead, they declared that LAPSI could not stay within the APsaA if it had both incompetent (not carefully selected) training analysts-and Kleinians.251 The APsaA officials added that the APsaA would not guarantee to accept cases supervised for membership of the APsaA that were not 'within the model of the mind understood as the appropriate model by the American'.252 The Kleinians were to be penalised on account of their beliefs, ideas that were shared by a large number of members of the IPA. Arthur Ourieff maintained that 'it was absolutely implied that we had to get rid of the Kleinians' and that the situation was Ourieff's problem, not theirs. At a meeting with Stanley Goodman and Edward Weinshel from the APsaA, Ourieff was told that if LAPSI was to remain within the APsaA, LAPSI had to do something about its infectious and destructive problems. The APsaA officials refused to help him.253 Morton Shane, a LAPSI analyst with close connections with the APsaA at the time, regarded the APsaA as having 'chickened out'. The APsaA's insistence that only Freudians could be accredited and that LAPSI should not allow Kleinians into the institute was illegal and there was also Bail's threatened lawsuit alleging discrimination by LAPSI on the grounds that he was a Kleinian which I return to below. Shane maintained that the APsaA leaders must have talked to a lawyer when they denied having told LAPSI to get rid of the Kleinians. In Shane's opinion, the APsaA would have backed down had LAPSI stood up to them.254 However, Ourieff did not feel he was strong enough to challenge the APsaA fully.255 While it was politically naive not to have obtained the APsaA's policy in writing and since the APsaA officials were not honest about what had been said, Ourieff was placed in an impossible position.256 Caught between his loyalty to LAPSI and his embarrassment before the APsaA, as director of an institute he was frightened about the APsaA. Although a Kleinian, Grotstein believed Ourieff did the best he could.257 Six weeks before an APsaA site visit to the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in 1974, the dean of education, Sam Eisenstein received what he termed 'a strange request' from the APsaA: 'Will you identify which of your (a) faculty, (b) teachers, (c) supervising, and (d) analysing instructors are not oriented to classical analysis?' Eisenstein commented, 'This was the first of repeated requests of that nature. Our statement that there are probably a few analysts on our faculty who do not practice classical analysis, but that none was a member of the Education Committee, was listened to with incredulity'. Later, during the site visit the chairman of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute was blatantly told, 'You are not being honest with us. Come on, who are the Kleinians?' Then, Eisenstein noted, names of the members of the Education Committee were mentioned and 'we were asked to specify what kind of analysis they were practicing'.258 Kleinman recalled that Eisenstein replied to the APsaA,
The APsaA officials had disowned the leadership of LAPSI and was demanding of LAPSI that they get rid of the Kleinians, that Kleinians should not be allowed to teach, train or supervise, Because Ourieff never got anything in writing. As Albert Mason put it, 'They hung him out to dry. Apart from the threat of a lawsuit, it would have reflected on the American badly internationally'.260 In his secretary's report to the Board on Professional Standards in 1976, Edward Weinshel, said,
This representation of the APsaA position can be challenged on several grounds. First, while the description of the level of quarrelling and divisiveness in LAPSI is accurate, (the APsaA's own role in further fomenting it is not mentioned!), the APsaA was scarcely indifferent to the theoretical orientation of the courses to be taught within the institute. The APsaA view never varied. They strongly recommended that the basic teaching should be classically Freudian, 'traditional American psychoanalysis'. Second, by claiming that it was untrue that the APsaA regarded the basic problems at LAPSI to be the controversy between Freudians and Kleinians, Weinshel called into question Ourieff's and LAPSI deputy director Rollman-Branch's reports on their meetings with himself and other APsaA leaders in which the LAPSI leaders claimed that they were instructed to 'get rid of the Kleinians'. However, it is far more likely that the APsaA realised they could not get away with such statements publicly, especially with the threat of a lawsuit from Bail which would claim discrimination on the grounds of theoretical orientation.262 Third, the APsaA was not so much concerned with fights in the society as with those in the institute, most particularly with the Kleinians' training analyst status which gave the Kleinians some power in the institute over training and standards.263 Fourth, approaches by the APsaA to the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute demanding a list of Kleinians in their institute belied the statement that the APsaA was concerned only with the animosities within LAPSI and unconcerned about the theoretical orientations of the protagonists. Weinshel's statement showed up why Ourieff's position as director of LAPSI
was untenable. While publicly denying discrimination on theoretical grounds and
placing the responsibility on local personality issues, nonetheless 'privately'
the APsaA told the LAPSI leaders that they had to 'get rid of the Kleinians'
from the institute if they wanted to remain within the APsaA and that Kleinian
training was not acceptable for membership in the APsaA. Faced with the choice
of either admitting discrimination or blaming Ourieff, APsaA officials denied
their private directives and made Ourieff a scapegoat. The Greenson-Mason debate By the time of 1973 APsaA site visit, the LAPSI's polarisation had come to reflect the polarisation in London between the Anna Freudians and the Kleinians although there were few straight Anna Freudians in Los Angeles, she was nonetheless influential. The official negative reaction to Klein was, according to Grotstein, related to three issues: first, to Anna Freud's influence over a number of Los Angeles child analysts; secondly, Kleinians were seen as a threat because of their popularity-Albert Mason was particularly popular; and thirdly, according to James Grotstein, 'it had to do with the obsession of one man-Greenson. I think if Greenson had died earlier, the problem would not have been so inflammatory'. Greenson led the anti-Kleinian movement at the beginning until it took hold and became an independent force. Grotstein recalled that at a dinner party Greenson told him that 'he had promised Anna Freud that he would destroy the Kleinian movement in the U.S. and I believe he meant it. He acted in all sincerity and he acted as if he had that as a mission'. According to Grotstein, Greenson helped 'to unify the fear of the Kleinians, that they would take away patients, they were going to break down the institute and colonise and take it over'.264 Nonetheless, Greenson was so close to Anna Freud that his close friend, Leo Rosten said that Anna Freud 'put him in charge of her armies here'.265 But the bitterness in the Los Angeles Institute mushroomed following the events of the evening of September 20, 1973 when Ralph Greenson presented the paper, 'Transference: Freud or Klein', to the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society that he had presented at the IPA Paris Congress in July 1973.266 This paper was the result of Greenson's investigations into Kleinianism. He attended private seminars and sought case supervision from visiting British Kleinians. According to Brandchaft, Greenson's interest in Klein derived from the personal friendship between Greenson and Brandchaft.267 Greenson wrote, 'I told my Kleinian colleagues that I was coming to learn how Kleinians work and was not interested in becoming a Kleinian'.268 Greenson and Wexler investigated Kleinian approaches using case material. Around 1968, they regularly participated together in a research group presenting their work with some prominent members of LAPSI who included Alfred Goldberg, Gerald Aronson and Bernard Brandchaft. The discussion, Brandchaft believed could have been critical but 'would have been a cr |