Elizabeth Severn

The "Evil Genius" of Psychoanalysis

Arnold Rachman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317303367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicoanálisis

Elizabeth Severn: The 'Evil Genius' of Psychoanalysis chronicles the life and work of Elizabeth Severn, both as one of the most controversial analysands in the history of psychoanalysis, and as a psychoanalyst in her own right. Condemned by Freud as "an evil genius", Freud disapproved of Severn's work and had her influence expelled from the psychoanalytic mainstream. In this book, Rachman draws on years of research into Severn to present a much needed reappraisal of her life and work, as well as her contribution to modern psychoanalysis.

Arnold Rachman's re-discovery, restoration and analysis of the Elizabeth Severn Papers – including previously unpublished interviews, books, brochures and photographs – suggests that, far from a failure, that the analysis of Severn by Ferenczi constitutes one of the great cases in psychoanalysis, one that was responsible a new theory and methodology for the study and treatment of trauma disorder, in which Severn played a pioneering role.

Elizabeth Severn should be of interest to any psychoanalyst looking to glean fresh light on Severn's progressive views on clinical empathy, self-disclosure, countertransference analysis, intersubjectivity and the origins of relational analysis.

1

FINDING PSYCHOANALYSIS

A personal journey

Personal motivation

It has been said that the motivation to become a psychoanalyst is derived from the individual’s desire to solve his/her own personal problems. Although I was not conscious of this motivation when I began my academic and, later, clinical studies to become a psychoanalyst, I can now see personal motivation informed my desire to become a clinician. It also informed my attraction to phenomenology, humanistic psychotherapy, Sándor Ferenczi and the Budapest School of psychoanalysis, and finally, relational psychoanalysis (Rachman, 2006). My childhood contributed emotional issues. Two major emotional issues lingered from childhood into adulthood: feelings of maternal coldness and emotional distance, and feelings of domination and control. My longings in a relationship were for empathy and equality, and responsivity and flexibility. What was missing with my mother, I experienced with my grandmother. For nine years of my childhood, prior to my father’s death, I also experienced interest and warmth.

During my pre-college years I was most responsive to teachers who showed an interest in me and affirmed that I was a student with some ability. This kind of attention was a marked contrast to my mother’s response to me, which I clearly felt lacked affirmation and affection. I felt she did not like me. My lifesaving experience, the one that kept me from becoming dysfunctional, was the ongoing loving relationship my grandmother provided. I knew and felt that she loved me. What is more, she showed her affection directly toward me by referring to me, in her native German, as “mein Gellebter” (“my beloved”). She also had a dream for me, which she shared: “Mein Gellebter,” she would say, “you would make such a fine teacher. You are tall, good looking, like your father. You are smart!” This affirmation of me by my grandmother became part of my internal psychological structure. In my career, I have published 100 papers, seven books, and given hundreds of presentations. I was also appointed a professor, fulfilling my grandmother’s dream for me.

My development as a humanistic psychotherapist

I did not come to psychoanalysis easily. In fact, I was involved in a protracted and difficult struggle to find a home in the field of psychoanalysis. The struggle was intellectual, interpersonal, and emotional. In truth, I did not have an ambition to become a psychoanalyst. My original aim in pursuing postgraduate training was to improve my capacity to be a psychotherapist. I had first been trained as a humanistic psychotherapist at the University of Chicago. But, I chose an analytic institute in New York City because I wanted to return to New York and my family for postgraduate training, after finishing my education and training at the University of Chicago. If I had not been interested in returning home, I would have pursued a postdoctoral program at the University of Wisconsin where Carl Rogers and Eugene Gendlin had gone after Chicago to establish a client-centered psychotherapy training program with the more disturbed clients. In other words, at that time, after graduating with a doctorate in human development and clinical psychology in the 1960s, I was interested in further developing my understanding and functioning as a humanistic psychotherapist. At the beginning of my postgraduate training, my theoretical orientation was informed by a group of scholars who were termed “the third force” in psychology and psychotherapy (Bugenthal, 1964; Fromm, 1956; Maslow, 1962; May, 1958; Rank, 1996; Rogers, 1961). I developed an orientation as a humanistic psychotherapist that was intellectually and emotionally compatible with my personal needs and my personality.

My academic training as an undergraduate at the University of Buffalo in the late 1950s and at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s emphasized phenomenology, humanistic psychology and psychotherapy, and the American philosophical traditions of democratic and liberal thought of G.H. Mead and John Dewey (Farber, 2006; Hickman & Alexander, 1998; Mead, 1934). I had combined these intellectual and clinical ideas with my clinical training in client-centered psychotherapy at the University of Chicago. The Counseling Center at the University of Chicago, founded by Carl Rogers, focused on a clinical approach of accurate empathic understanding, responsiveness, clinical flexibility, and unconditional positive regard. In the 1960s, many clinical psychologists felt like second-class citizens in contrast to the elevated and superior status automatically given to psychiatrists. Social workers, in that era, had status because they were viewed positively as being a psychiatrist’s right hand. Psychologists, however, were greeted with criticism and hostility by many psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, who viewed them as a direct financial and competitive threat. It was not until the American Psychological Association successfully sued the American Psychoanalytic Association and International Psychoanalytic Association for constraint of trade for refusing to accept psychologists in their approved analytic training institute that the so-called lay analyst could receive equal status with medical analysts. This prejudice toward non-medical analysts developed in the United States, in spite of the fact that non-medical analysts, such as Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Otto Rank, were approved by Freud and the orthodox analytic community. I was very fortunate to train at the Counseling Center, where academic clinicians such as Rosalind Cartwright, Eugene Gendlin, Laura Rice, John Shlien, and Fred Zimring affirmed and helped solidify my identity as a psychologist/psychotherapist. It was with this positive identity as a therapist that I left the University of Chicago and looked forward to my experience of postgraduate training in psychoanalysis in New York City. The Counseling Center and Rogers’ humanistic psychotherapy perspective provided me with an emphatic approach, which I brought to my analytic training.

A Confusion of Tongues trauma in analytic training

Almost immediately after entering analytic training at the Institute in New York City I was thrown into a Confusion of Tongues trauma (Rachman & Klett, 2015). The trauma was created by the Dean of the Institute in a series of disturbing experiences (Rachman, 2004b). These experiences interfered with my enjoying a positive introduction to psychoanalysis and caused me to question my desire to pursue analytic training. In my opinion, the Dean was a hyper-aggressive, dominating, intellectual, and emotional bully. In a series of emotionally damaging experiences, early in my training, I found him to be unempathic, overpowering, and severely critical. These experiences were completely different from my academic and training experiences at the universities of Buffalo and Chicago, where I felt affirmed and prized (Rachman, 2006). The trauma began on the first day of orientation for new analytic candidates. Each director of a department at the Institute spent five-to-ten minutes in some form of a welcoming address. In his address, the Dean said the following, which made me question whether I had made a serious mistake in coming to the Institute:

“If you believe that Eric Fromm is a psychoanalyst that you will study here, you are in the wrong church and wrong pew.”

This declaration against Eric Fromm as a dissident whose ideas were not welcomed in the Institute was shocking to me. Eric Fromm was viewed at the University of Chicago as a psychoanalyst who was compatible with humanistic psychotherapy. When I discovered Ferenczi (see Chapter 2), I found one of Fromm’s works to be extremely important for my Ferenczi research (Fromm, 1959). He, as I later found out, valued Ferenczi’s work. In those first moments at the Institute I felt alone and unwanted, as none of the candidates raised an objection to the Dean’s condemnation of Fromm. I was too frightened and confused to speak up.

A still more disturbing event occurred during the same first week of training and contributed further to the Confusion of Tongues trauma. I had finished my course of study for my doctorate in clinical psychology and human development in the spring of 1964. I was interviewed, prior to finishing my PhD, at the American Psychological Association meeting in Chicago by the late Ted Reiss, PhD, the Director of Research at the Institute. After interviewing me, Ted Reiss told me it was not necessary for me to see anyone else from the Institute because he accepted me for training, right then and there. A feeling of elation lingered after the Ted Reiss interview. He made it clear he found me a potentially worthwhile analytical candidate. I found him a responsive and likeable person. This positive interview helped me look forward to my new training experience. But a problem arose in scheduling my doctoral exam before I could leave Chicago and come to New York City. None of my doctoral committee was available for the oral exam during the summer. I was to begin analytical training in September.

My analytical training began in September of 1964. Before leaving Chicago I called the director of the Psychology Department, the late Tao Abel, PhD, and asked her if I could begin my analytical training without completing my doctoral orals before I left Chicago. I said I had arranged to take my oral examination in the fall. She completely agreed with my plans and told me to come to study at the Institute without any reservation.

At that time, I thought that passing the oral examination was just a formality, not a necessary final step to having earned your doctorate and being referred to as doctor. This discrepancy exploded in my face in that first day of contact with the Dean of the Institute. In my attempt at honesty and full disclosure, I revealed to him that I had not taken my orals and was planning to take them in the fall. Furthermore, I told him this arrangement was approved by the director of the Psychology Department. I was under the impression he had been informed of this arrangement. No sooner had I told him about the oral exam dilemma than he blurted out:

You are a psychopath, young man! You’d better fix this, right away. I can’t have you ruining my post-doctoral program with your high jinks. You are going to get your orals done as soon as possible or you are out of here!

I deeply felt his rage towards me. He was so emotionally out of control that he could not hear me clearly say that I had checked with the head of the Psychology Department, gotten permission to enter the analytic training program without the orals, and made preparations to take my orals in the fall. His rage prevented him from hearing me.

Prior to the Dean becoming enraged with my postponing the oral examination, the dissertation committee had given me approval to schedule my oral examinations in the fall of 1964. As the Dean was screaming at me and calling me a psychopath, I was trying to tell him I had taken care of scheduling the formal requirements for the doctorate. Both the doctoral committee members at the University of Chicago and the director of psychology at the Institute raised no objection to my plan and were totally positive and cooperative with me. They affirmed the positive feeling as a person and clinician I had enjoyed during my experiences at the universities of Buffalo and Chicago. The Dean’s extremely negative reaction to my disclosure about the doctoral orals intensified and expanded the Confusion of Tongues trauma that had been activated the first day of orientation at the Institute. Anxiety, confusion, and anger predominated my experience during the next week. I felt I had been honest and forthright but the Dean said I was a psychopath, manipulating the Institute and him to satisfy my need to challenge authority. Just as I began to seriously entertain dropping out of the training program, I found an empathic presence at the Institute. This presence was to allow me to continue and begin a positive journey on the road to becoming a psychoanalyst.

I began my personal analysis shortly after the beginning of my Confusion of Tongues trauma, as the Dean continued to create emotional difficulties for me (Rachman, 2004b). The late Betty Feldman, MSW, became the empathic presence that I needed in the next four years of my analytic training (Rachman, 2014c). In our first week of sessions I unloaded my trauma on her shoulders. Her empathic response demonstrated to me how psychoanalysis can integrate phenomenology and humanistic psychotherapy. She listened to me and then, as her first response, self-disclosed her experience with the Dean. She told of her perception of him as an overly aggressive individual who had a decided tendency to create emotional crises with male candidates when he felt threatened by them or felt they were questioning his authority. It is impossible to fully describe in words how emotionally embraced I felt at that moment in my analysis. Betty’s response was important to me in several ways: it helped me own my experience of the trauma; it wasn’t all me, it was also him; I may have done something neurotic, but I wasn’t a psychopath. Then I was able to express my anger toward the Dean with my family, friends, and fellow candidates. Betty provided me with the empathy I badly needed at a moment of emotional crisis, the kind of empathy to which I was accustomed at the Counseling Center. I felt affirmed, prized, and given unconditional positive regard. Betty Feldman’s therapeutic behavior showed me the value of an analyst who can embrace empathy within the analytic encounter, a way of being that I embraced in my later thinking and functioning as a psychoanalyst (Rachman, 1997a, 2003a; Rachman & Klett, 2015). In my later research on the Freud/Ferenczi relationship, I realized this kind of empathy was what Ferenczi wanted from Freud.

Although I did receive some affirmation from my fellow candidates, their relationship to the Dean prevented them from fully responding to my need. The Dean was considered one of the foremost role models as a psychoanalyst at the Institute. He was considered a powerful, successful clinician who was the right-hand man of the Institute’s founder and one of its most prestigious members. The Dean’s status as an analyst, teacher, and supervisor was elevated by the fact he rarely accepted any candidates for analysis and even less often for supervision. He held himself aloof as a very desirable but unattainable analyst. Finally, almost all candidates were afraid of him. They were willing to put up with what I would now term emotional abuse (Rachman, 2004b) so that they could graduate from the analytic training program. I believe it is a part of the psychodynamic of analytic training institutes that the candidate’s desire to graduate and become a practicing psychoanalyst suppresses the confrontation with the emotional abuse of authority. This psychodynamic was clearly illustrated in the comments of a second-year candidate when I told him, as a first-year candidate, about my difficulties with the Dean. He offered the following response, with a smile on his face:

Listen, Arnold! I know the Dean can be a son-of-a-bitch, sometimes. But, I am only interested in graduating and starting a practice. I am not interested in locking horns with him.

My intense difficulties with the Dean can illuminate the question as to how I decided to train at the Institute. When choosing a postdoctoral training program in New York City, I was acquainted with two programs, New York University’s postdoctoral program in psychoanalysis and the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health. For some reason, the William Alanson White Institute, which was in NYC, was not on my radar. I was not interested in a traditional analytical program, which focused on a Freudian orientation of psychology and psychoanalysis as I have discussed. I wanted an analytic experience which believed in clinical empathy, responsiveness, flexibility, and creativity. My interview for the NYU postdoctoral program did not go well. The interviewing analyst focused on my interest and acquaintance with psychoanalysis. I did have some knowledge of analytic authors, such as Fromm, who were compatible with the third force in psychology and psychotherapy. The NYU analyst who interviewed me seemed critical that I had not sought out personal analysis as a graduate student. He gave me the distinct impression that he did not view me as someone who was dedicated to psychoanalysis (which, of course, at that point in time, was true). Consequently, I was not accepted at NYU’s postdoctoral program. There is some irony in that some 20 years later I became part of NYU’s postdoctoral program as a member of the Relational Track. As I have outlined, I had an excellent interview with the late Ted Reiss who seemed to feel my phenomenological and humanistic psychology background was an asset. He never questioned my not having been in personal analysis. The Institute also had the reputation as having an eclectic/liberal analytic approach.

When I began to question whether I should continue my analytic training at the Institute, another experience, in addition to my analysis, helped me realize becoming an analyst was a reasonable goal. At the time of my anxiety and self-doubt, a senior supervisor at the Institute, the late Alice Hampshire, MD, took a special interest in me. After working with me for a couple of weeks, as a senior supervisor, she offered the following dramatic statement:

Arnold, you are too intelligent, too interested in empathy and being clinically responsive to be at the Institute. You should enroll at the William Alanson White Institute. That’s the place for you.

Where did this “angel of empathy” come from in my great moment of need? Alice Hampshire’s reaction to me was the complete opposite of the Dean’s reaction. I now felt elated, supported, understood, and affirmed. I could not wait to tell my analyst what Alice Hampshire had said to me. She had provided me with what seemed like a very positive way out of my trauma. No sooner had I told my analyst of my desire to transfer to the William Alanson White Institute than I was faced with another layer of the trauma. Without hesitating for a moment, and speaking in a decisive and focused manner, Betty Feldman responded to my plan to transfer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• About the author
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Finding psychoanalysis: a personal journey
• 2 Finding Ferenczi: my struggle to build a bridge from phenomenology and humanistic psychotherapy to relational analysis
• 3 Finding “R.N.” as Elizabeth Severn
• 4 Finding The Elizabeth Severn Papers: an unknown legacy of psychoanalysis
• 5 Eissler finds Severn: discovering the Eissler/Severn interview
• 6 Freud’s condemnation of Severn as an “evil genius”
• 7 Todschweigen (death by silence): removal of Elizabeth Severn’s ideas and work from mainstream psychoanalysis
• 8 Psychoanalysis of difficult cases: Freud’s case of the Wolf Man and Ferenczi’s case of Elizabeth Severn
• 9 Elizabeth Severn as a person
• 10 Severn finds Ferenczi: from psychiatric patient to analysand to analytic partner
• 11 Severn as a clinician
• 12 The development of trauma analysis
• 13 Analyzing the Ferenczi/Severn analysis
• 14 The rule of empathy: Ferenczi and Severn’s contributions
• 15 The clinical in-vitro experiment in intersubjectivity between Ferenczi and Severn
• 16 The Confusion of Tongues between Sándor Ferenczi and Elizabeth Severn
• 17 A two-person psychology for psychoanalysis: Severn and Ferenczi’s analytic partnership
• 18 Non-interpretative measures in the analysis of trauma
• 19 Severn’s trauma of premature termination
• 20 Severn’s recovery, 1933–1959: “To Work, To Love” (Freud)
• 21 Severn and Ferenczi’s recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse: an appraisal
• 22 The development of therapeutic regression: Severn, Ferenczi, and Balint
• 23 Severn’s Orpha function: resilience and recovery from trauma
• 24 Ferenczi’s case of R.N., Elizabeth Severn: a landmark in psychoanalytic history
• 25 Severn as a psychoanalyst
• References
• Index