The Rapaport-Holt Letters
A Master-Student Collaboration on Psychoanalytic Theory
During the final 12 years of his life, David Rapaport left the Menninger Foundation and moved to the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, MA. He kept touch with former students and colleagues in Topeka, but most frequently with the one who had been most inspired to try to follow in his footsteps, Robert R. Holt. In this collection of their correspondence, one can follow the interlocked final and most productive years of a master of psychoanalytic theory, and the early-mature developmental phase of a student who sought to continue and even transcend the master’s work. In them, we see how Rapaport functioned as a teacher and mentor, at the same time treating his younger colleague as an equal whose critique of his own work was to be welcomed and respected.
The reader can see here how Rapaport developed and reworked his greatest theoretical contributions, the critical and synthetic review of major problem areas in psychoanalysis, and how he made good use of sympathetic but unsparing criticism, modeled on his own critiques of Holt’s beginning efforts. Always with a primary concern to discern and preserve the best and most lasting parts of Freud’s work, Rapaport shows his willingness to take seriously some fundamental challenges to the basic structure of metapsychology, which Holt was to beginning at this time to formulate and which he developed in the years after his mentor’s death.
[These years, 1948 through 1960, also saw major changes in the personal lives of the two correspondents as their friendship deepened. Though these aspects of the letters are downplayed, some readers may be interested in the human side of their lives and their effects on the joint work.
[The total corpus of the correspondence amounts to about 290 letters. Of them, 149 were considered worth including, comprising a total of over 350 pages. Brief précis of the ones of least interest are given in chronological order in periodic summaries. Those contain excerpts of the most relevant parts of a good many letters, so that the reader will have a smaller task of discerning grain from chaff. The entire corpus is divided into three approximately equal parts, only the first of which—the letters of 1948 through 1955—are offered here. Each of the remaining thirds will be posted as their editing is completed, in approximately annual installments.]
The present installment is divided into five “chapters.” Each of those is described below, with links to the letters themselves. Notice that each description includes several links, to groups of letters (and occasionally of separate commentary or explanatory material) and to a cumulative listing of References Cited and Persons Mentioned.
[We hope that readers will be helped identify frequently mentioned people whose names may not be as familiar to them as, for example, Heinz Hartmann and Robert S. Wallerstein (whose names do not appear in the list). Likewise, the reference list remains constantly available since many works come up repeatedly, and anyone who wishes to look them up does not have to search for their first mention. Finally, notice also that you are encouraged to Comment on anything that you wish to discuss, criticize, or suggest. We hope that some of the interchange between the correspondents will stimulate reflections and interchange among readers on topics of recurrent interest to anyone concerned with psychoanalysis.]
[The following work has not been copyrighted and remains in the public domain. We request only that any quotations from these materials be attributed correctly to the source.]
Who May Be Interested in These Letters And Why
(by R. R. Holt)
In offering this collection of letters written over half a century ago, I owe prospective readers an idea of why they might find it worth the trouble to go through them. Since this blog has such a broad and diverse readership, here are some reasons why different readers might find something of value here.
I hope it is obvious that historians of several kinds may find them interesting, not only those who focus on the history of psychoanalytic theory in particular but those involved in various other branches of the history of science: that of clinical psychology, of psychiatry, of medicine more generally, even of the history of ideas. For both correspondents were well aware of the fact that they were touching, from time to time, on a broad range of historical literatures and of the resonance of the development of psychoanalytic theory to recurrent themes in those histories.
Perhaps the largest group of possible readers are psychoanalysts by profession, or professionals with a strong interest in the discipline Freud began.
[If that description fits you who have read so far, you probably know of David Rapaport and associate him with ego psychology and metapsychology, two outmoded endeavors in the psychoanalysis of a good many years ago. Yet in your reading of Freud, you will have discovered that a good deal of what he wrote dealt with just these matters, and that those are among the most difficult parts of his works. You may have not felt wholly satisfied by some of your teachers’ dismissal of them as outmoded and not worth the effort required to make an independent judgment. Rapaport was notable precisely for his deep interest in elucidating their meaning, showing their relevance to clinical realities, and—based on an unsurpassed mastery of Freud’s entire output and of the rest of the psychoanalytic literature of his time—for his mighty effort to organize the contained theories, integrate them, compare them with other contemporary sciences, and lay out the result with clarity and a keen architectonic sense. My efforts to follow the work of my mentor, applying to the latter’s drafts the same searching critical methods and standards he had taught me, led me to raise questions that helped the older man to think through and clarify his writing. Questions Rapaport could not answer and those on which we two agreed to disagree continued to motivate me in my subsequent contribution to the overthrow of metapsychology generally and ego psychology in particular.
[Following our conversation and arguments may therefore help you understand how and why those branches of psychoanalysis have been generally abandoned. It may also stimulate adherents of contemporary schools to ask how far the variant of psychoanalysis they prefer satisfies the standards to which the correspondents held the theory of their day. Presently, psychoanalysis looks to the interested outsider like a loose grouping of more or less competing schools of thought and practice. I find it hard to believe that it has a bright future unless they can be reintegrated in the fashion Rapaport undertook in The Structure of Psychoanalytic Theory.
[Since both correspondents were deeply interested in and committed to empirical research on psychoanalytic propositions, the letters should be of value to anyone with a similar commitment today. One sees here how Rapaport stimulated the formation of the Research Center for Mental Health at New York University by me and George S. Klein, and nurtured its growth, even though he never succeeded in gratifying his own wish to develop an experimental program. The origins of lines of work actualized there may be clearly seen in these letters, work that continues to develop in a variety of settings today.
[Finally, both of us were concerned with philosophy and its implications for what we were trying to do—of course, methodology and related aspects of the philosophy of science, but also fundamental, metaphysical implications. Freud could not be fully understood, we realized, without searching out his implicit metaphysical assumptions and his relation to contemporary developments in philosophical thinking. It becomes evident to any close student of his works that he was bedeviled by the mind-body problem and never developed a satisfactory stance on it.]
Chapter 1: Introduction; letters of 1948-1951
Main theoretical topics discussed: “stimulus barrier,” authoritarian personality, ego autonomy & hierarchical structure; application of psychoanalysis to the TAT; underlying assumptions: mechanistic vs. organismic, Kant vs. Whitehead.
Click Here to Read: Chapter 1: Introduction; letters of 1948-1951