Douglas Kirsner discusses his new research published in his recent article, ‘Do as I say, not as I do: Ralph Greenson, Anna Freud and Superrich Patients’ (Psychoanalytic Psychology, Vol. 24, 3, 2007, pp. 475-486).
Op ed by Douglas Kirsner
Today it can be difficult to imagine a time when psychoanalysis ruled the roost in mental health. During the 1950s and into the 1960s the major psychiatry programs were psychoanalytically oriented and more than half the chairs of psychiatry were analysts. Psychoanalysis was the default option for understanding and for cure. Psychoanalysts effectively controlled psychiatry, where psychoanalysis commanded immense respect as they did in the culture at large where it was an important part the zeitgeist, not only in New York.
Psychoanalytic style residencies were the most popular and psychoanalytic institutes were finishing schools for psychiatrists. Psychoanalysis went with a pervasive sense of power as the intellectual and clinical means of production of mental health. Psychoanalytic practice afforded a very good income to practitioners whose middle class clientele included other mental health professionals who in turn used forms of psychoanalytic therapy on their own patients. Psychoanalysis was the top of the food chain and informed practice all the way down the line. Psychoanalysts treated psychiatrists and residents who worked in mental hospitals and dealt with the more severely ill, such as in state mental hospitals.
The ‘Golden Age’ of psychoanalysis gave way during the 1970s to a ‘Silver Age’, before ineluctably declining to what today must be its ‘Bronze Age’. But the context of the Golden Age provides an explanation of the impact for good or ill that leading psychoanalysts had during this period. This history has impacted on how psychoanalysis has been passed down through the generations until today and some of the scions of the halcyon days can be seen through archival evidence to have feet of clay. I described the internal institutional history of American psychoanalysis in Unfree Associations: Inside Psychoanalytic Institutes but I was not prepared to find that if anything I underestimated the extent of the political activities masquerading as science and unethical behavior at the top. After I had written the book, I had reason to investigate the history of the Los Angeles Society and some of its important figures still further. Everything in Los Angeles is writ large. If during the Golden Age psychoanalysis provided a good income from a middle class clientele across the United States, it provided a phenomenal income from a celebrity clientele in ‘Tinsel Town’.
Ralph Greenson was the king of this culture, the master of ceremonies who dealt out celebrity and superrich referrals to his entourage of eager followers in Los Angeles. But not only to them. Ever one to curry favor, Greenson established an increasingly close relationship with Anna Freud, soliciting her with offers of riches from patients and then through organizing his super-wealthy patients to provide Anna Freud’s Hampstead Centre with significant funds. Although it is well known that Greenson stretched boundaries with Monroe, his practice of blurring boundaries with other patients, and helping to funnel their money to Anna Freud’s Hampstead Center, is not known. It reached its apogee in the case of Lita Annenberg Hazen, Greenson’s patient for over a decade from 1965. Hazen was not only President of Greenson’s Foundation for Research in Psychoanalysis but was also through Greenson’s encouragement, a major contributor to the Hampstead Centre. Greenson even went so far as to answer a personal advertisement on Hazen’s behalf and fly to New York for a weekend to interview the suitor. These activities took place with Anna Freud’s knowledge, approval, and collusion. Hazen presided over a Foundation that provided him, through no accident, with funds to ‘research’ his paper, ‘Transference: Freud or Klein?’ This was planned to be an important part of the armamentarium in what he told Anna Freud was ‘our war against the Kleinians’. (I have described the shenanigans of the way he and Anna Freud made politics masquerade as science in their no-holds-barred common campaign against the Kleinians in ‘Politics Masquerading as Science’ in the December 2005 issue of Psychoanalytic Review).
However, as he was breaking all the rules himself, Greenson wrote the ‘bible’ of psychoanalytic technique, The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis (1967). His nostrums about how ethical and pure psychoanalysis should be practiced were at significant odds with his own. Whatever the ethical standards of the time, Greenson provided a model the rules of which he continually and flagrantly broke with the connivance of a Trans-Atlantic Axis. This article presents new evidence from the examination of the papers of Ralph Greenson and Anna Freud at UCLA and the Library of Congress. I have found that every time I read over my evidence and the versions of the article, I was not numbed by the behaviors but was continually shocked by Greenson’s lack of ethics and the knowing collusion by Anna Freud and others. In all the correspondence I read between Anna Freud, Greenson, Masud Khan and others, I came across very few glimpses of recognition that they were going along with anything remotely wrong.
There was an exchange in this folie a deux (or more!) There was an exchange—Greenson provided the money through his superrich patients and Anna Freud provided the mantle, kudos and entry into the inner sanctum of psychoanalysis. Anna Freud turned a blind eye to the origins of the donations to a worthy cause but corruptive influences and unethical practice were involved. As revealed by other correspondence in the collections that I discovered, Anna Freud also profited personally from the transactions via Greenson, though to a considerably lesser extent. This also needs to be understood as being part of a wider international context and web where Greenson, Anna Freud and others were deeply involved together in the war against the Kleinians. Greenson’s The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis acted as a bible for generations of analysts on what to do and what not to do in psychoanalysis. It would have been at least less hypocritical if he and his collaborators in Los Angeles and across the ocean had taken his advice. Leo Rangell’s wonderful chronicle, My Life in Theory, details the consequences of such issues as he experienced them. We should not underestimate the impact that such behaviors have had on the psychoanalytic situation today.