The Longitudinal Study and Its Setting
The 1950s in America, so often described as a conservative, conformist time, was also an era of radical change in psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and the study of child development. In New Haven, Yale’s Child Development Clinic was transformed into the Child Study Center with a heavy psychoanalytic interest, the Yale Psychiatry Department became a leading center for the application of psychoanalytic thinking, and a local psychoanalytic society and institute were formed. In Andrew Fearnley’s apt phrase, it was a time of “institutional rupture,” and the longitudinal study emerged in that time of rupture.
The radical changes of the 1950s had been foreshadowed twenty years earlier and a few yards away from the Child Study Center, where Yale had brought analysts and other researchers together in an interdisciplinary center. The Institute of Human Relations, heavily underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation, opened in 1931 and represented the interests and ambitions of Yale’s dean of medicine, Milton C. Winternitz, a pathologist, and its president, James Angell, a psychologist. Winternitz, memorably characterized as “a steamroller in pants,” thought social medicine required the input of law, psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, economics, psychiatry, child development, and perhaps religious studies. He proposed that Yale move its law and divinity schools to adjoin the medical school and that their major departments share the new institute building. The law and divinity faculties fought off what they saw as Winternitz’s power grab, and though the Institute of Human Relations continued through the 1930s as a place of broad interdisciplinary study, Arnold Gesell early on foreshadowed the institute’s fate when he literally closed off the space of his Child Development Clinic.
Similarly, one of the institute’s psychoanalytic researchers encountered problems like those that Mayes and Lassonde have described facing the study’s investigators: more data than one knows what to do with. The researcher was Earl Zinn, a psychologist who from 1920 had pioneered psychologists’ study of sexuality. In 1925 he had been sent to Europe by the Committee for the Study of Sex to investigate the applicability of psychoanalysis to their studies, and he took some analytic training before being drawn back to the Institute of Human Relations, where psychologist and learning theorist Clark Hull was attempting to test analytic formulations in behavioral terms.1 In New Haven, Zinn took part in the ambitious interdisciplinary discussions of the institute and analyzed some of its faculty. He had earlier made a pioneering electrical recording of his four-year treatment of a schizophrenic patient and found that there were more data than he could analyze with the tools available to him. He recruited Geoffrey Gorer, later a very well known social anthropologist, to search the material for what might have been distinctive about the patient’s early life. Gorer decided he needed to know more about what normal childhood was like, and one much later result was his book The American People: A Study in National Character. Gorer and Zinn wrote but finally did not publish a book based on the recorded material.2
Another analytically trained faculty member at the institute was the psychologist John Dollard, who became well known for his writings on psychoanalysis and learning theory. A program developed in which either Zinn or Dollard would analyze a staff member whom the other would supervise in a required one-year analysis of a patient—a rudimentary analytic training to prepare young social scientists to apply analytic insights to their work. Dollard, who remained in New Haven for the rest of his life, was involved in the earliest formation of local psychoanalytic organizations, though his views of aggression as something developed entirely in relation to frustration put him at theoretical odds with many analysts.3
In 1935 Yale extended an invitation to Erik Erikson, a Viennesetrained child analyst then struggling to support himself and his family in Boston, to consult at the Institute of Human Relations, in pediatrics and in psychiatry, and at the Child Development Clinic. He accepted the invitation with the encouragement of a three-year grant from the Macy Foundation. Erikson was the first psychoanalyst at what became the Child Study Center, but his career there was cut short. The Child Study Center’s director, Arnold Gesell, had begun the systematic study of preschool children in 1918 and had accumulated a mass of normative observations with photographs and film. At a conference one year after Erikson’s arrival, Gesell ordered that a photograph of a three-year-old boy with an erection and masturbating be omitted from the record. Erik son challenged the decision and soon afterward Gesell cut off Erikson’s access to Yale Child Study materials, citing confidentiality concerns.4 Erikson and his group later published their own findings on the basis of incomplete data they had managed to accumulate.5
Erikson decided to devote more time to the Institute of Human Relations, where John Dollard was spelling out a view relating psychoanalytic drive-based development to social and economic factors, both through childhood and beyond—an outlook that clearly contributed to Erikson’s later eight-stage plan of the life cycle. Both Dollard and Erikson stressed the importance to development of historical and economic considerations, but they apparently had no influence on the later Child Study Center work.
Marian Putnam joined the Yale Pediatrics Department in 1921 and then took several years away to study psychiatry with Adolf Meyer in Baltimore and for other clinical work in Boston. In 1933 she went to Vienna for psychoanalytic training, and returned to Yale with an appointment in psychiatry and mental hygiene. She became convinced that eating disorders in children often reflected the mother’s ignorance about the infant’s emotional development and she developed an educational program that encouraged maternal interest. She also studied early differences in temperament as predictive of later pathology.6 The then-chair of psychiatry, Eugen Kahn, was known for his antipathy to psychoanalysis, and it is likely that her position in his department was made possible by her family’s social standing as Boston Cabots and Putnams. Her father, James Jackson Putnam, had been the founding professor of neuropathology at Harvard, had met Freud and hosted his Adirondack trip after the Worcester lectures in 1909, and had been a leading defender of psychoanalysis in the United States.7
Marian Putnam returned to Boston in 1938, where she later founded the James Jackson Putnam Center and taught early courses on child analysis, but while still in New Haven she took part in the Institute of Human Relations discussions and served as psychiatric consultant to pediatrics. She and Erikson both knew Putnam’s Hopkins classmate Edith Jackson from their Vienna days, and they urged Jackson to come to New Haven, where she took Putnam’s place as psychiatric consultant to pediatrics.
Edith Jackson was from a wealthy, troubled Colorado family. Her mother had committed suicide when Edith was three, as did an older brother when she was a young adult. She had come to Yale as a junior faculty member in pediatrics but interrupted her New Haven years in 1927 to pursue analysis in Washington with Lucille Dooley, whom she had known in medical student days at Hopkins. In 1931, she decided to go to Vienna for analysis with Freud; she soon began analytic training there, met for two hours a week with Anna Freud to discuss child analysis, and had a practice of five analytic patients.8 During her Vienna years she contributed funds to several analytic causes and financed a preschool nursery at 13 Bergasse that was known as the Jackson Nursery from its founding in 1936 until the Nazis closed it in 1938. The Jackson Nursery was the forerunner of the wartime nursery project of Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud.
Soon after Jackson’s return, Joan Erikson was to deliver her third child. She pressed to be able to have the child with her immediately after delivery, which New Haven Hospital refused to do until Mrs. Erikson came down with mumps, whereupon, with Jackson’s urging, she was allowed to keep the baby with her in an isolation unit. Edith Jackson cited this experience of a “contented” mother and baby in her later campaign for the establishment of an experimental rooming-in project. Her vision was of a warm obstetrical service where experienced nurses cared for mothers and babies, where both mothers and pediatric residents could observe and learn about babies, and where pediatric and obstetrical residents might learn to listen more attentively to new mothers. While the project in its six-year experimental phase attracted international attention and some grant support, the initial construction expense for a four-bed unit was guaranteed by Edith Jackson herself, at a cost of half her Yale salary. The experiment ended in 1952, by which time the rooming-in concept was well established and enthusiastically embraced by many in Yale obstetrics and pediatrics.9 Edith Jackson continued as clinical professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Yale until she moved to Denver in 1960; and she served as a member of the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Study of the Child from its first appearance in 1945 until her death. Ernst Kris used her observations on infants from the rooming-in project at an early stage of the Yale Longitudinal Study.10 Soon after the eventful birth of that third child, Erik Erikson accepted a five-year Rockefeller grant to participate in a new longitudinal study in Berkeley. He went on to a career at Berkeley, only to return to our story in 1951.11
Through much of the 1930s, on the other side of New Haven, Dollard and others had been instrumental in encouraging Harold Lasswell, the author of Psychopathology and Politics, to visit and teach at the Yale Law School, where after 1946 he became the Edward J. Phelps Professor of Law and Political Science.12 In his early adulthood Lasswell had some analysis with Theodor Reik in Vienna and some form of analytic training.13 In Chicago in 1930 he conducted what he called psychoanalytic interviews on a couch, recording both the interviews and associated pulse, blood pressure, and body movements, thereby becoming apparently the first person to call for the collection of such data.14 Lasswell became a “non therapeutic” member of the early Chicago Psychoanalytic Society in 1933.15 His early study of rationalization led to extensive work on the propaganda of World War I, and to work in Washington, D.C., in World War II; in addition, with Harry Stack Sullivan and the anthropologist-linguist Edward Sapir, he formed a research team that strove for “the fusion of psychiatry and social science.”16 He was a prolific and influential political scientist who continues to be republished.
Most of the psychoanalysts engaged in the longitudinal study came from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Milton Senn and Ernst and Marianne Kris had their professional homes in New York, the Krises having left Vienna at the time of the Anschluss. Samuel Ritvo had pursued analytic training there, graduating in 1948 and moving to New Haven in 1950; and Albert Solnit would finish his analytic training as the longitudinal study got under way. Sally Provence, the pediatrician who was a central figure in both the research and clinical aspects of the study, had trained under Senn at Cornell. Seymour Lustman, who began a Yale psychiatry residency as the study began, was an exception to the New York rule: he came from Chicago, where he had obtained a Ph.D. in psychology and an M.D. He became an early graduate of the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.
The longitudinal study had three overlapping psychoanalytic environments beyond the Yale Child Study Center: the New York Institute, mentioned earlier; the newly forming regional Western New England Psychoanalytic Society and Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis; and the Yale community, especially its medical school and departments of psychiatry and of pediatrics. All three of the groups were at least partially disposed to favor the study because of the central role of infantile neurosis in the growth of psychoanalytic thought.
Two major figures in launching area psychoanalysis were Robert Knight and Fritz Redlich. Of the two, Knight was the more experienced clinician, teacher, and administrator. As a young midwesterner visiting Europe, Knight obtained a letter of introduction to Freud, and upon being granted a brief visit asked Freud to autograph not one but several photos. Freud refused, then gave in with some grumbling about American mass production. The incident captures something of Knight’s confident effectiveness. Like most of the first analysts at the Menninger Clinic, he had trained at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and had been involved in the establishment of the Topeka Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in 1936, immediately becoming involved in national psychoanalysis as the new society’s councilor. Knight had long been regarded as the outstanding clinician at the Menninger Clinic and in 1947 he became director of the Topeka Psychoanalytic Institute. He grew restless, however, and after a few months accepted an offer to lead the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Riggs had used a kind of reeducative therapy developed by its eponymous founder, and Knight quickly developed it as “a center for inpatient psychotherapy of all types, but mostly dynamically oriented, for voluntary patients who can live in an open building under minimal supervision.”17
Knight assembled a remarkable group in Stockbridge: Roy Schafer, already an experienced researcher but still short of his doctorate, became chief psychologist, with the understanding that everything possible would be done to make possible his training in analysis; and within a year funding was found to bring David Rapaport as a full-time researcher and teacher, with the assurance that he could devote all his time to the continuation of his study of thought processes. The young Margaret Brenman and Merton Gill accompanied Rapaport from Topeka. Both Brenman and Gill were recent analysands of Knight’s and were much involved in joint research, to which half their time was apportioned. Brenman once described the resulting organization as “incestuous.”
As early as April of 1950 Knight organized a meeting in Stockbridge that anticipated some of the developments of the next few years in New Haven. Anna Freud discussed Ernst Kris’s paper “Psychoanalytic Views on Child-Psychology.” She addressed the question of whether the direct observation of children could break new ground for psychoanalytic knowledge, or whether it was useful to confirm or refute findings made during treatment. Some of the results of this work had already been published in collaboration with Dorothy Burlingham in Young Children in War-Time in a Residential War Nursery and Infants without Families.18 She felt that the direct observation of children had a legitimate place in the psychoanalytic study of childhood because the sources of psychoanalytic knowledge of children had always been mixed, though she said that the most important findings were derived from reconstruction during adult analysis.19
In 1951 Erik Erikson reappeared on the local stage when he accepted Knight’s standing offer of a position at Riggs. While at Berkeley, Erikson, despite his lack of formal degrees, had become a professor of psychology and lecturer in psychiatry, as well as a training and supervising analyst in the San Francisco Institute and president of its society and institute. But when in 1950 the California legislature enacted a law requiring all state employees to sign a loyalty oath, Erikson led a protest and conducted a national campaign to urge analysts not to accept appointments in the California system. Erikson thought Knight would be sympathetic to his liberal perspective; he knew, for instance, that Knight and his wife had opened their Topeka home to Paul Robeson a few years earlier when no Topeka hotel would register an African American, an action that had led to Mrs. Knight being snubbed by many of her Kansas friends. Even as Knight assembled his Stockbridge team and reorganized the Riggs Center, he served as second chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s newly organized Board on Professional Standards and then as president of the local association when the society and the institute were founded in 1952. This was also when he was engaged in founding the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.20
Fritz Redlich was a Viennese who had begun his analytic training before leaving at the time of the Anschluss. He came to Yale in 1942, and was about to finish his analytic training at the New York Institute when he was tapped to take over chairmanship of the Psychiatry Department from Eugen Kahn in 1949. Upon assuming the chairmanship, Redlich made known his dream of a psychoanalytic society and institute in New Haven. Although at the outset Redlich was a less experienced administrator than Knight, he quickly assembled a group of talented analysts and created a remarkable psychiatry department. Redlich brought in Lawrence Kubie from New York and Robert Knight from Stockbridge as visiting clinical professors, and recruited an outstanding full-time faculty that came to include Theodore Lidz, Norman Cameron, Jules Coleman, and others.
In 1949 Alfred Gross, who had trained in Berlin and who had successively been a training and supervising analyst in the British Society and at Topeka, left the Menninger Clinic for New Haven. He soon encouraged Henry Wexler and William L. Pious, another Topeka training analyst, to follow him. Eventually these three shared a secretary and a waiting room with the new institute. For several years that waiting room was the institute’s only space. In effect, then, a Topeka group functioned across town from the Child Study Center’s mostly New York group, while the Yale Psychiatry Department next door combined both neo-Sullivanian and New York influences.
In 1951, just as Erik Erikson accepted the position in Stockbridge, the New York Institute adopted a policy requiring all its trainees to practice in New York. With Erikson’s arrival the area had four experienced training and supervising analysts, the number then thought advisable for the organization of a new institute, and indeed, the New York policy and the presence of so many experienced analysts sped the local institute’s development. When in 1951 a psychoanalytic society formed, it was mentioned in the Bulletin of the American Psychoanalytic Association as the “New Haven–Stockbridge Group.”21 The institute was founded on a revolution or at least on a coup d’état in January 1952.22 Two hours before the society held its first scientific meeting in Litchfield, Erikson, Gross, Knight, and Pious met and constituted themselves as an education committee (ignoring their tentative earlier appointment as such by the society). They then declared their intention to apply in their own name for recognition as a new training facility and adopted procedures for application, for screening and enrollment, and for drawing up a curriculum. The institute’s unusually thoughtful procedures evolved over years of deliberations, some of which have been preserved in committee minutes and others in detailed memoranda circulated among the group for written comment. Some of the most extended discussions that survive are typescripts dictated to their common secretary by Pious or by Wexler to forward to the other, who then responded in a similar way, all across that small waiting room. Helen Ross wrote in 1958 that the Western New England’s remarkable written materials constituted “a Doctor Spock on how to conceive and bring up an institute.”
It is still the case that most institutes are offspring of societies and that societies and institutes are to varying degrees less independent of each other than is the case at the Western New England. The decision of the education committee to seek its own recognition resulted in an institute that grew out of an education committee, rather than an institute that appointed an education committee. The founders succeeded in minimizing the educational impact of the political and guild issues that are inescapable in a professional organization like a psychoanalytic society: the education committee controls all educational issues and is a self-perpetuating group, like the governing bodies of some universities. This organization helped reassure the founders that education wouldn’t be compromised by political pressures as was then happening not only in California but even at Harvard, where appointments of some faculty members with left-wing affiliations were not being renewed.
But the institute’s founders felt that a much more real and immediate threat to educational autonomy was Fritz Redlich, who had proclaimed his wish to have a complete department of psychiatry, including a psychoanalytic institute. The Yale Child Study Center was an interdisciplinary organization that was closely involved with the medical school and its psychiatry department and was the site for Yale’s child psychiatry training, but in the days of the study it maintained an independence that, among other things, ensured that child psychiatry was not subsumed, as was usual elsewhere, under a department dominated by adult psychiatry. The Yale Child Study Center, like the institute, was mindful of its independence.
Within a year of his arrival in Stockbridge, Erik Erikson gave a talk on “The Irma Dream—50 Years Hence.”23 This psychoanalytic classic incorporates material from the newly published Fliess letters about Freud’s life at the time of the dream, with a new perspective on the manifest, particularly visual, parts of the dream. The paper strained Erikson’s relations with Anna Freud, who is thought to have been displeased with his presumption in adding to her father’s published self-analysis.24
While the Child Study Center and the Yale Department of Psychiatry were in New Haven, the new institute was split between New Haven and Stockbridge, with a part-time secretary maintaining a full set of records, correspondence, and so on, in each place. Meetings of the education committee, like classes for candidates, might be scheduled in either place; and some society meetings were held in Stockbridge. The work done by the secretaries was enormous, when one reflects on the volume of correspondence, drafts of policy statements, curriculum and organizational plans, and bibliographies in a pre-word-processor, prephotocopier, pre-answering-machine, and pre-fax age. Some articles available only in German at that time were translated by early faculty members.
The first institute class of seven, which began its studies in 1954, was selected from thirty-five applicants, and the second class, one year later, included Seymour Lustman, who managed to take part in the longitudinal study and to study psychoanalysis simultaneously. Most applicants for training were from New Haven but half the training analysts were in Stockbridge. Some candidates made the long commute for their analyses and many more, in each direction, for classes and supervision. Despite the logistical problems, many Yale faculty members undertook training, and through the 1950s there were almost no ward chiefs or service chiefs in Yale psychiatry who were not analysts or candidates or, in a few cases, dropped candidates; and many of the next generation of child psychiatrists from the Child Study Center pursued psychoanalytic training.
It is common to speak of those days as a golden age for psychoanalysis, and perhaps it was for the practitioner. For those concerned with psychoanalytic education, however, the success of psychoanalysis in the university threatened a future in which analysis and the analytic procedure might be co-opted by the much greater resources and academic opportunities available for psychotherapy or some other modification or application. Indeed, Gerald Klerman, who transferred to the Western New England Institute from the Boston Institute as a candidate in the 1960s, when he assumed a Yale professorship, presented his initial proposal for a manualized Interpersonal Psychotherapy as a way of making a case for psychoanalytic treatment by demonstrating the efficacy of even a stripped-down procedure, one teachable to modestly educated assistants and designed to be so simple as to be testable. Within a few years the psychiatric literature abounded with claims that interpersonal psychotherapy had been demonstrated to be effective, unlike psychoanalysis, which of course is much less easily tested.25 The Klerman phenomenon captures a tension that ran through those years between the Yale Psychiatry Department, where Klerman had been recruited to direct a new mental health center, and the psychoanalytic institute.
In 1954, as classes first began, the institute had accepted the psychologists George Mahl and Roy Schafer as candidates. This occasioned intense questioning from the American Psychoanalytic Association, as did David Rapaport’s teaching, since in 1953 the association had adopted a motion stipulating that faculty members must be eligible for membership (at the time, membership was open only to physicians). There was a thoughtful but intensely argumentative correspondence between Pious and successive chairs of the Board on Professional Standards that extended over several years. When the association insisted that Schafer not be given any control cases, Pious pointed out that he had already started one, so it was insisted he not start another. Board and committee debates continued for three years. Interestingly, the issue of nonmedical training did not divide the Psychiatry Department, the institute, and the Child Study Center but rather united them in a common cause, though there was smoldering discontent in the forming psychoanalytic society, which was composed mostly of psychiatrist-psychoanalysts.
Another kind of fame came to the psychologist Margaret Brenman, whom the institute appointed in 1954 as a training and supervising analyst. Then, as now, such appointments are reviewed by the Board on Professional Standards, and this one caused a floor fight at the December meetings. Brenman had trained at the Menninger Clinic under one of the early research waivers, and one condition of the waiver as it had been understood by most members was that it was for research training only; waivered graduates would agree not to practice. In Pious’s words at the board meeting on December 7, “Prior to the actual vote there was a long and, at times, very rancorous discussion and argument.” Several motions that would in effect have deferred approval of the appointment were debated heatedly and at length. Again in the words of Pious, “At that point our application came up for consideration and the fur really flew! Every effort was made by a few individuals to put off bringing this matter to a vote. These efforts even included threats of resignation, etc.” The appointment was finally accepted by a 4 to 1 majority. Next day at the Executive Council, Joan Fleming mentioned the Brenman appointment at the end of her description of the board meeting. Roy Grinker said the American Psychoanalytic Association was establishing a precedent that would gravely affect its relations with American medicine and called for a vote of no confidence in the Board on Professional Standards.26 Ives Hendrick, who was by then president, denounced at length the action by the board and by the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, ending with, “How are we going to hold up our heads if we continue these practices? How can we represent ourselves to American medicine?”; and Robert Knight spoke with open scorn of what he called the hypocrisy of Hendrick’s statement. After a long debate, the council voted to reject Hendrick’s motion. This set a local pattern of welcoming and appointing highly qualified candidates from several disciplines and of opposing on the national level what Henry Wexler called the attempt “to make the world safe for medicalocracy.”27
In 1951 Merton Gill left Riggs for New Haven, where he was soon appointed a training analyst, the first addition to the original group of four. Gill, however, left New Haven after only two years, and Erikson left Stockbridge in 1960. Roy Schafer moved to New Haven in 1953, where he wrote, taught, published extensively, and became a training and supervising analyst until he, in turn, left in 1975 for a Freud Professorship in London and then for New York City. In the new institute, much thought was given to education for research and there was a research course at the beginning. Pious, in fact, organized the faculty into three departments: psychoanalytic theory, psychoanalytic practice, and psychoanalytic research.
David Rapaport helped launch an unspoken but powerful tradition of scholarship and intense application to teaching. He had been discovered by Karl Menninger on a trip to the Osawotomie State Hospital in Kansas, where the psychologist had administered the Rorschach and Szondi tests to Menninger and astonished him with a lengthy and sophisticated report on the results. Rapaport had learned of psychoanalysis as a boy in Hungary from a relative of his father, a psychoanalyst who professed a reluctance to write. The young Rapaport wrote two psychoanalytic books for that relative, both published before his twenty-first birthday. After two years in Palestine he returned to Hungary at the behest of his Zionist organization to promote youth recruitment. While in Hungary he completed degrees in mathematics and experimental physics, a doctorate in psychology and philosophy, as well as a Montessori teaching certificate, and had two or three years of personal analysis. He is said to have learned testing “almost entirely on his own.” He hoped that a unified theory of thinking and learning would lead to a demonstration of the validity of Kant’s view of knowledge as codeter-mined by experience and inherent mental tendencies. “He was intense and restless, worked endless hours, and expected others to do the same. His badly damaged, rheumatic heart led him to feel that his days were numbered, and he carried on as if life were a race against time. An insomniac, he read half the night and taught himself to take notes in the dark while tossing in bed.” Robert Knight claimed that in his first years in America, Rapaport had sat up most of each night reading the entire back issues of all the English language psychoanalytic literature, having already covered all that had been published in German and Hungarian. At Topeka, Rapaport audited every institute class but declined to seek graduation. He worked incessantly and had almost no social life. Margaret Brenman noted that when he made a major point he “pronounced it in a loud, evangelical, and absolutely authoritarian tone that hardly promoted discussion.” He criticized loose thinking and even in casual conversation required all assertions to be supported by precise and abundant references; he expected his associates and later his students to recall not only exact passages but also their page numbers. Transcripts of his famous series of Western New England metapsychology courses bear out the picture of an extremely intelligent, endlessly demanding, and severely formal seminar leader. One early candidate, a junior faculty member at Yale, took off a whole day a week to prepare for each Rapaport seminar; nights and weekends seemed insufficient. By 1955 Rapaport’s special place was formally acknowledged when he was appointed chair of the Department of Psychoanalytic Theory and faculty consultant. The preserved correspondence between Pious and Rapaport indicates that Rapaport made himself something like a dean of faculty, raising questions about scheduling, course sequence and content, facilities, and so on. Pious assured him at one point that the commuting demands on students would be lessened because courses would be held from now on in Torrington, halfway between New Haven and Stockbridge, at the Yankee Drover Inn, though the plan fell through. Rapaport was a leading systematizer of psychoanalytic thought and his work aligned with that of Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein. In that sense, his work was naturally sympathetic to the theoretical leanings of the Yale Child Study group, though his lack of a clinical orientation made for some tension. Kris and Hartmann for their part supported Erikson against charges of excessive environmentalism brought by Anna Freud and some other analysts.
With Hans Loewald’s arrival from Baltimore in 1955, New Haven gained one of the most thoughtful and quietly revolutionary voices in psychoanalysis. Loewald was not a child analyst, though his wife, Elizabeth, trained in child psychiatry and worked at the Yale Child Study Center. His formulations on the development of psychic structure stressed the internalization of infant interactions with the caretaker as constitutive of the psyche, including the drives. His writings were not always easily accepted by analysts, who were then finding their way toward increasingly clear formulations based on the structural theory, but civility permitted a very fruitful tension among Loewald’s views, those of the New York-Child Study cadre, and those of the Topeka-Stockbridge group.
Events that boded ill for the study and for the nascent analytic community happened in early 1957, when Ernst Kris, fifty-six years old, died unexpectedly on February 27 and Alfred Gross, 64, passed away two days later. Much more happily, in March, Sam Ritvo began his long career as a training and supervising analyst and member of the Education Committee. Ritvo’s appointment, the first of a New York–trained analyst, brought a new point of view into the institute’s educational arm and heralded the development of a close interweaving of the study’s analysts with the new institute. In 1960 the first students trained at the Western New England Institute graduated, and Jack Plunkett and Roy Schafer were elected to society membership.
On December 14, 1961, David Rapaport died at the age of forty-nine. Erikson had left the Austen Riggs Center the year before Rapaport’s death, and Robert Knight soon fell ill with the cancer that was to take his life in 1965. The psychoanalytic powerhouse that had been Riggs, and that had been a vital center of the intellectual and educational lives of those in the institute, rapidly wound down. Analysts remained there and one was briefly a training and supervising analyst before he left for California. Some institute courses continued to be held there for a few more years. By the end of the 1960s Wexler wrote to the Committee on Institutes, “We no longer receive requests for training in psychoanalysis from residents of the Austen Riggs Center, nor do any members of the Austen Riggs staff teach at our Institute.” Rapaport’s death cleared the way for Seymour Lustman to lead the institute’s research teaching.
In the institute’s first bulletin Erik Erikson had outlined a plan for the study of the infant, child, and adolescent, but the implementation of this plan only came about in 1962 in New Haven, with Seymour Lustman, Sally Provence, Sam Ritvo, and Albert Solnit as faculty members and Marianne Kris as a consultant. Infant and preschool observation for all candidates was introduced. The Yale Child Study Center was and remained the source of child analytic faculty and of most child analytic students. The child program flourished for many years under the joint and alternating chairmanships of Samuel Ritvo and Albert Solnit, and more recently under Wayne Downey and Kirsten Dahl. The longitudinal study and its staff probably influenced the analytic community more than the community affected the study. This was in large part due to the caliber and energy of the child analysts, who taught in the basic medical school curriculum, led courses in adult psychiatry residency, consulted on pediatric cases, and educated others in every part of the institute curriculum, in addition to being very active in the society and in outreach programs. Ritvo, Solnit, and Lustman became training and supervising analysts and played leading roles locally and nationally.
A second revolution of sorts now took place and is succinctly described by one of its principals. In a 1966 report, Albert Solnit, clearly building on the experience that he had gained from serving on a subcommittee with Roy Schafer and Henry Wexler as part of the institute’s first review of curriculum, wrote:
1962 is also a dividing line in time in terms of other revisions of the curriculum and in terms of the marked decrease of the influence of David Rapaport. . . . Additions to the faculty and to the Education Committee from 1962 until the present, and the great void created by the death of Robert Knight in the past year have gradually changed the Institute and its curriculum from one mainly influenced by the Topeka group to one influenced by graduates of other institutes, especially the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and most importantly by graduates of our own Institute who have become faculty members. . . . This changing influence has tended to decrease the gulf between metapsychological and clinical theory which David Rapaport and his students emphasized.28
Anna Freud, whose 1950 appearance at Stockbridge we have noted, made month-long visits to New Haven from 1964 through 1971. While there, in addition to teaching with Jay Katz and Joseph Goldstein at the Law School, she took part in meetings at the Yale Child Study Center, led two clinical seminars for analytic candidates, was a guest at a meeting of the Education Committee and of its new Clinic Screening Committee, and presented a paper at one society meeting. Her visits related to collaborations on family law that eventually were published in Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, Before the Best Interests of the Child, and In the Best Interests of the Child, all with Joseph Goldstein and Albert Solnit.29
Meanwhile, research in the Yale Psychiatry Department led in many directions. Redlich promoted interdisciplinary work, and in this respect both the Psychiatry Department and the Child Study Center could be described as natural successors to the Institute of Human Relations. His work in the 1950s included a major collaboration with the sociologist August B. Hollingshead on Social Class and Mental Illness, which provides an extensive description of New Haven at the time of the longitudinal study, and a characterization of psychiatry as it was then practiced in the community and the university. The book has inspired an extensive literature on social psychiatry and is still cited.30 Another early fruit of the Redlich chairmanship was a remarkable symposium on the psychotherapy of schizophrenia, timed to celebrate the beginning of the Lidz era at the Yale Psychiatric Institute.31 In collaboration with Merton Gill and Richard Newman, Redlich also published the best discussion of its time on psychiatric interviewing.32
The orientation of the major study of schizophrenic patients under Theodore Lidz and Stephen Fleck was influenced by the typically adolescent onset of the symptoms and by Lidz’s earlier exposure to Sullivanian thought and his formative years as a resident and chief resident under Adolf Meyer at the Phipps Clinic in Baltimore. He and his group were analysts but thought that the ego psychologists, and by implication the Yale Child Study group, paid too little attention to the social surround; some of their best work described the family setting of schizophrenia.33 Like Dollard and Erikson, they questioned the existence of aggressive drives and stressed that aggressive behavior and psychological conflict could most usefully be studied in the social, especially family, context. Lidz and Fleck were members of the local psychoanalytic society, but unlike the Child Study Center analysts, were not deeply involved. Lidz for some years led a yearlong medical student course on the life cycle, in which Child Study analysts taught, and one of his most ambitious books was a study of the life cycle, which relies on his own thought and also on Erikson’s formulations, particularly those outlined in Childhood and Society.34 Interestingly, although his disagreements with the points of view of the Yale Longitudinal Study’s analysts were clear, it was Lidz who provided one of the most perceptive outside appreciations of the longitudinal study:
Planned, scientific study of the infant’s development has been carried out only during the past three or four decades. It has not always been obvious that the infant’s personality development is a topic for scientific study. Direct observation of infants and children over the course of time probably started with Gesell’s careful studies of maturation that established landmarks for comparison, and with Piaget’s studies of the cognitive development of his own children in the service of epistemology. Currently, a variety of direct studies are expanding our knowledge of the period. Longitudinal studies through infancy and childhood are difficult to carry out, and many of them tend to focus on some specific facet of the problem to avoid a complexity that cannot be handled with scientific rigor. Only an occasional study is conducted in the infant’s natural habitat, the home. The longitudinal studies of the infant and his family being carried out at the Yale Child Study Center are unique in their efforts to combine direct observation with psychoanalytic study, and to consider the essential data despite its inordinate complexity because simplification is possible only at the price of considerable error. These studies seek to consider the child’s make-up at birth, his or her particular abilities, the mother’s personality and problems, child-rearing patterns, and the influence of other family members, etc. They seek to relate the interplay of such factors during infancy to later personality development and characteristics.35
Another major figure in the Psychiatry Department was Norman Cameron, who completed a Ph.D. in psychology before attending medical school and who had preceded Lidz as a student of Adolf Meyer at the Phipps Clinic. He had initially been dismissive of analysis but during a two-year period of forced bed rest for tuberculosis he read philosophical and psychoanalytic books and became fascinated.36 He trained in analysis in his fifties, which was remarkable at the time. In 1953 Redlich convinced him to leave a chairmanship of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin with the promise of time to write, and Cameron finished his analytic training at the Western New England Institute. Cameron’s Personality Development and Psychopathology: A Dynamic Approach is one of the most successful general descriptions of psychopathology from a psychoanalytic point of view, and his paper “Introjection, Reprojection, and Hallucination in the Interaction between Schizophrenic Patient and Therapist” is considered a classic.37 Cameron’s wife, Eugenia, was a child psychiatrist who had coordinated mental health outreach programs for children in Wisconsin and who had a Yale appointment. In his writings Cameron drew heavily not only on studies in developmental psychology but also on Sally Provence’s work on maternal deprivation and on some of the early publications from the longitudinal study, especially Ritvo and Solnit’s “Influences of Early Mother-Child Interaction on Identification Processes,” which is based on the case of Evelyn, reported elsewhere in this volume.38
On the clinical front, psychiatry residents were deeply affected by the teaching of another of Redlich’s recruits: Jules Coleman, who had left a professorship in Denver to head up outpatient teaching at Yale. Coleman had received his medical education in Vienna and had been influenced by the work of Wilhelm Stekel, whose intuitive genius and ability to divine the unconscious of others resembled Coleman’s own. Coleman was a New Yorker but had obtained his analytic education in Chicago, commuting there from Denver by train, and like Lidz, Fleck, and Redlich he remained peripherally involved in local psychoanalytic organizations. Every psychiatry resident passed through Coleman’s service, learning a form of brief but intense therapy that quickly highlighted character resistances, formulated them in a good-humored way, and left them alone. A student who later became one of the most thoughtful observers of modern psychoanalysis and psychotherapy wrote that he thought Coleman “the most creative teacher I have known, and, to my mind, the most sophisticated psychotherapist of our day.”39
Coleman’s and Redlich’s interests in social psychiatry were timely in another way. In 1953 Richard C. Lee was elected mayor of New Haven, and remained mayor through the years of the longitudinal study. The Lee administration effectively oversaw a far-reaching redevelopment program, which involved relocation and property redevelopment and some ambitious attempts at social development. For years New Haven received more funding per capita for social and construction projects than any other American city and was the focus of national attention. So the longitudinal study proceeded in a city of dramatic, hopeful physical and social changes and in a rapidly developing university and psychoanalytic community characterized by social and political optimism.
NOTES
1. Ernest Jones to Sigmund Freud, November 30, 1925, and December 18, 1925, both in R. Andrew Paskauskas, ed., The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908–1939 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 583, 587–88.
2. Geoffrey Gorer, The American People: A Study in National Character (New York: W.W. Norton, 1948); Geoffrey Gorer and Howard Zinn, unpublished manuscript in the author’s possession.
3. John Dollard et al., Frustration and Aggression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939).
4. Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (New York: Scribner, 1999), 128.
5. Erik H. Erikson, Studies in the Interpretation of Play: Clinical Observation of Play Disruption in Young Children, Genetic Psychology Monographs 22, no. 4 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), 557–671.
6. Eleanor Pavenstedt, “Marian Cabot Putnam,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 28 (1973): 17–20.
7. George Prochnik, Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology (New York: Other Press, 2006). Freud later asked Putnam to assume the presidency of the International Psychoanalytic Association; see “James J. Putnam,” in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1957–74); and “An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17 (1917–1919), 271–72.
8. D. J. Lynn, “Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Edith Banfield Jackson, 1930–1936,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 31 (2003): 609–25.
9. S. L. Silberman, “Pioneering in Family-Centered Maternity and Infant Care: Edith B. Jackson and the Yale Rooming-in Research Project,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64 (1990): 262–87.
10. Ernst Kris, “Notes on the Development and on Some Current Problems of Psychoanalytic Child Psychology,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 5 (1950): 24–46.
11. Friedman, Identity’s Architect.
12. Harold D. Laswell, Psychopathology and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930).
13. Roy R. Grinker, Sr., “The History of Psychoanalysis in Chicago, 1911–1975,” Annual of Psychoanalysis 23 (1995): 155–95.
14. A. W. Fraser, review of Arnold A. Rogow, ed., Politics, Personality, and Social Science in the Twentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Harold D. Lasswell (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1969), Psychoanalytic Quarterly 40 (1971): 701–3.
15. “Chicago Psycho-Analytical Society,” Bulletin of the International Psycho-Analytical Association 15 (1934): 365–66.
16. P. Cushman, “Confronting Sullivan’s Spider—Hermeneutics and the Politics of Therapy,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 30 (1994): 800–44.
17. “Events in the Psychoanalytic World,” Bulletin of the American Psychoanalytic Association 4 (1948): 28–31.
18. Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, Young Children in War-Time in a Residential War Nursery (London: Allen & Unwin, 1942); Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud, Infants without Families (London: Allen & Unwin, 1944).
19. Dorothy Burlingham, “The Anna Freud Lectures in America—1950,” Bulletin of the American Psychoanalytic Association 7 (1951): 126.
20. “Robert Knight,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 1 (1953): 5–6.
21. “Events in the Psychoanalytic World,” Bulletin of the American Psychoanalytic Association 8 (1953): 66.
22. Much of what follows and is otherwise without citation is based on David A. Carlson, “Western New England: The First Fifty Years; An Anniversary Speech,” September 14, 2003, New Haven, CT, unpublished paper in the archives of the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, New Haven.
23. Erik H. Erikson, “The Dream Specimen of Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 2 (1954): 5–56; Erikson, “Events in the Psychoanalytic World,” Bulletin of the American Psychoanalytic Association 8 (1952): 66–73.
24. Friedman, Identity’s Architect, 284–91.
25. Gerald L. Klerman et al., Interpersonal Psychotherapy of Depression (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
26. Grinker was a Chicago neurologist and analyst who was analyzed by Freud and established a major psychiatry program at the Michael Reese Hospital after World War II. His writings on the treatment of combat neuroses had done a lot to popularize psychotherapy and psychoanalysis at the end of the war.
27. Henry Wexler, Memorandum to the Education Committee, December 9, 1954, in the archives of the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.
28. Carlson, “Western New England,” n.p.
29. Albert J. Solnit, “Biography,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 44 (1996): 13–25; Joseph Goldstein et al., The Family and the Law (NewYork: Free Press, 1965); Jay Katz, Joseph Goldstein, and Allan M. Dershowitz, Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and the Law (New York: Free Press, 1967); Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud, and Albert J. Solnit, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (New York: Macmillan/Free Press, 1979).
30. August B. Hollingshead and Frederick C. Redlich, Social Class and Mental Illness: A Community Study (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958).
31. Eugene B. Brody and Frederick C. Redlich, Psychotherapy with Schizophrenics: A Symposium (New York: International Universities Press, 1952).
32. Merton M. Gill, Richard Newman, and Frederick C. Redlich, The Initial Interview in Psychiatric Practice (New York: International Universities Press, 1954).
33. Theodore Lidz, Stephen Fleck, and Alice R. Cornelison, Schizophrenia and the Family (New York: International Universities Press, 1965); Theodore Lidz, The Person: His Development Through the Life Cycle (New York: Basic Books, 1968); Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950).
34. Lidz, The Person; Erikson, Childhood and Society.
35. Lidz, The Person, n. 118.
36. R. M. Crowley, “Psychiatry, Psychiatrists, and Psychoanalysts: Reminiscences of Madison, Chicago and Washington-Baltimore in the 1930s,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 6 (1978): 557–67.
37. Norman Cameron, Personality Development and Psychopathology: A Dynamic Approach (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1963); Norman Cameron, “Introjection, Reprojection, and Hallucination in the Interaction between Schizophrenic Patient and Therapist,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 42 (1961): 86–96; Hans W. Loewald, “Norman A. Cameron, M.D—1896–1975,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 45 (1976): 614–17.
38. Samuel Ritvo and Albert J. Solnit, “Influences of Early Mother-Child Interaction on Identification Processes,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 13 (1958): 86–91.
39. Lawrence J. Friedman, The Anatomy of Psychotherapy (Hillsdale, N.J.: The Analytic Press, 1988), xiv.