ROBERT MICHELS
S33
Edith Kurzweil:
I think that the history of psychoanalysis in this coun–
try can throw some light on this issue, since this was the only country
where psychoanalysis was accepted by the culture at large, much more so
than anywhere else. It was picked up already in the 1910s by mind healers,
by religious groups, and developed in the general culture separately from
what the psychoanalysts did with their patients.
Robert Michels:
If you go back before two hundred years ago, there is
very little sense of the psychological importance of the first five or six years
of life.
It
was as though mental life began at age three and wasn't really very
important until four or five. What went on before that had no real lasting
psychic significance.
It
is hard to imagine such a view today, but it was the
prevalent one. Certainly psychoanalysis was one of the central intellectual
movements that awakened us to the great importance of the psychological
life and experience of the first five years. That is a core belief of psycho–
analysis. It is a tenet of everyone who calls him- or herself a psychoanalyst.
Without that, one could argue, there would be very little interest in child–
hood trauma. Just as there is not a great deal of interest in intrauterine
psychological experience, because no one believes it has that much effect.
In that sense you could say, by opening up interest in the first five years of
life, psychoanalysis softened the ground for later concerns about childhood
trauma. I find that too broad an argument, it's almost like blaming
Aristotle for every error in logic because he formulated the Posterior
Analytics.
It is impossible to talk about human behavior, about motivation, about
development in 1997 without using psychoanalytic concepts. We don't
have any other language. However it doesn't follow that every statement
made in that domain is the responsibility of psychoanalysis. I think the
child abuse issue is an important one. It has to do not only with false accu–
sations but probably with the small but significant prevalence of real abuse
that was long ignored, denied, and disavowed. That is far more important
numerically than false allegations and is a major social problem. Frankly, psy–
choanalysis hasn't done much on either side of that issue except to awaken us
to the importance of childhood. Once it did that its interest has been pre–
dominantly about the universal fantasies of childhood, not the deviant, atypical
realities.
Elizabeth Dalton:
I wonder if you could say something about psychoanalyt–
ic training. One hears that it is sort of comparable to the Catholic priesthood,
that the numbers have sharply dwindled. I've heard that an entire class at the
Psychoanalytic Institute was just canceled because there were no candidates.
