Manhattan Institute Director Lorraine Caputo interviews Dr. Irwin Hirsch on what it means to be “Interpersonal” and how the Manhattan Institute came to be. Also with Analysis Now blog Editor, Tricia Brock, MFA, LP, NCPsyA

LC: …Irwin, you have been such a visible presence and one of the major interpreters of the Interpersonal tradition. I find that with newer students, at least when I’m teaching, there is a lot of confusion about what’s Relational, what’s Interpersonal, what’s Intersubjectivity, and so some of my questions are kind of geared towards that because I feel like you have a good historical perspective.

IH: This question comes up all of the time in lectures and seminars.

LC: Yes. So that’s kind of the place where I wanted to start my questions.

IH: I’ve written about it a fair amount, in papers focused on comparative psychoanalysis.

LC: So this will be our initial focus. We hope to find out more about what role you have played in the development of the Interpersonal tradition, its contributions to the Relational model, how your view of yourself has evolved as an Interpersonal psychoanalyst and what your vision is for the future of Manhattan Institute, so we’re very ambitious today! And we are so looking forward to it. You have been a towering figure in the Interpersonal tradition with your writing, teaching, and supervising, and its relation to the development of the Relational construct. I looked back at the 1998 articles between you and Jay Frankel, and I noticed that term–you called it the “Relational construct.” You were engaged in the discussion of the Interpersonal school of thinking and the developing Relational model.

IH: An argument, I’d say.

LC: It was an argument, yes! Was I still in training? I remember feeling so protective of you when that was going on, but you were obviously not in need of my protection [laughs]. Your view, and I’m sure it still is your view, was that Interpersonal theory made a major contribution to the development of the Relational model.

IH: [It was] THE major [contribution].

LC: Tell me about that. Do you feel that’s not recognized enough in the field, and may contribute to any confusion that students might have that come to an Interpersonal institute?

IH: Interpersonal psychoanalysis starts in the early 1940s with [Harry Stack] Sullivan. The Relational construct begins with [Jay] Greenberg and [Stephen A.] Mitchell’s book in 1983, forty years later. Greenberg and Mitchell were both trained Interpersonally at the White Institute, and even in their PhD program at NYU they were trained by Interpersonal supervisors. They titled their book Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory. Ideally, for me, they would have called it Interpersonal Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory. Many people took their title literally, as embracing the British Object Relations perspective. It wasn’t—it was a way of integrating all theories that placed personal relationships at the center of human development, in contrast with drives and defense as most central to human development.

It was the most important book written in the last 50 years, more than 50 years. They found sympathy between the Interpersonal perspective, which was basically unknown outside of New York City and Washington, D.C., [before their book] and made no impact on the broader psychoanalytic community. One great contribution was conveying how much similarity there was between the Interpersonal perspective and other non-drive theory perspectives, which were not that well known in this country. That is, for instance, Fairbairn, Winnicott and the Kleinians were all non-drive theorists, though the Kleinians were a mixed model. Kohut’s American Self Psychology was a big part of what became “Relational Psychoanalysis.” Each of these theories had similar touchpoints, basically two: human development is not primarily based on sexual and aggressive drives and defenses against drives. That’s not what makes you, Lorraine, you, Tricia, you, and me, me. What makes me, me, and you, you, is largely the internalized history of human relationships in our lived lives.

That was one touchpoint between the relatively unknown Interpersonal tradition and the internationally better known Object Relations and Kleinian traditions. Greenberg and Mitchell juxtaposed those theories which place relationships at the heart of human development with those that place drives and defense as central. They basically brought Interpersonal psychoanalysis into the broader psychoanalytic conversation. Their book, which was powerfully popular, helped make Interpersonal psychoanalysis become better known outside of NYU Postdoc [New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis], the [William Alanson] White Institute, the Adelphi Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, the brand new Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis and in Washington, D.C. circles; where Sullivan was originally based. They introduced Interpersonal theory into the wider psychoanalytic population. What’s always been significant to me was that, given their background, Greenberg and Mitchell’s Interpersonal exposure made their thinking more heavily weighted toward Interpersonal theory than toward Kleinian, Object Relations and Self Psychology.

Jay Greenberg, I have heard, had a personal analysis with a prominent liberal, classical analyst, and he juxtaposed Interpersonal theory with a growing number of very liberal classical analysts, like Owen Renik, Ted Jacobs, and James McGlaughlin. Stephen Mitchell became quite interested in Fairbairn and saw many similarities, particularly between Fairbairn, Loewald (a prominent classical analyst) and the Interpersonal model. So, they brought Interpersonal thinking into the wider psychoanalytic world.

Now the differences between Interpersonal and those other Relational perspectives, what I have often written about, were not so much in developmental theory. They were all non-drive theorists, that is, we all grew up because of our history of internalized personal relationships. But what they did not write about as much, and it wasn’t their job to write about, were the differences in the theory of therapy among the various Relational perspectives. Among the different Relational perspectives, their similarity in the theory of therapy is that the analyst is, by definition, a subjective “other.” That is the analyst, as Sullivan said, is a “participant observer,” and as I, and as others have also said, an “observing participant.” John Fiscalini uses the term, a “co-participant.” The Interpersonal perspective emphasized more than the other Relational traditions, the irreducible subjectivity of the co-participating analyst. They all agree that the analyst is invariably a subjective co-participant in some way, as opposed to viewing the analyst as an objective interpreter. However, the Interpersonal tradition emphasizes more the impact of the unique person of the analyst. My second book, a book of some of my selected papers, was entitled: The Interpersonal Perspective: The Origins of Psychoanalytic Subjectivity. Greater emphasis was on who the person of the analyst is and how he or she gets caught up in the mutual enactment of a patient/analyst relationship. So, among other things I’ve written were critiques that those other Relational perspectives fail to see the analyst as subjective enough. They are not fully field theories, as brilliantly described by Donnel Stern.

LC: How so?

IH: Well, the Winnicottians emphasized the maternal; the analyst as a maternal other. Now, of course that is subjective. The analyst is not just an interpreter but engages as a maternal other, providing, i.e., what was absent maternally to the patient. But that’s not the person of the analyst. His or her unique “self” was not acknowledged as a part of the patient-analyst mix. The analyst was essentially a good enough mother, if you will. But that is not a wide variation of participation. Self Psychology was very similar to Winnicott in that the analyst provided empathy and the ability to see the patient, which was also a deficiency in mother or father, but the personal subjectivity of the analyst was not considered more widely. The concept of mutual enactment was not a part of the equation.

The Kleinians focused on projective identification. That is, we know the patient by virtue of identifying with them. The patient who is angry is not talking about their anger but we feel angry—they project their anger onto us analysts. But this doesn’t really account for the personal anger of the analyst, independent of the patient; that is, it is the patient’s projection only. It’s not that the analyst is also an angry person expressing his or her own anger; it’s just what was projected into the analyst. Those are the sort of things I’ve written about. My effort in a lot of things I’ve written has been to differentiate Interpersonal from the other Relational perspectives. All of the above traditions belong under the Relational umbrella, though their respective theories of therapy can be quite different. Most analysts who identify as Relational, lean toward one of the other major traditions, described above. Of course, for many, their thinking is some blend of these major traditions. Personally, I am not very blended; the Interpersonal tradition is where I am situated.

LC: One of the differences in that dialogue with you and Jay Frankel and from what you’re saying now, is that the Interpersonalists did not see the therapist as a reparative parent, in the way a Winnicottian therapist might. Is that correct?

IH: As a reparative other, yes, but not exclusively through empathy, or holding. It’s really through the development of an unconscious mutual and repetitive enactment, a concept that was initially introduced by Levenson in his first book in 1972. Then, 14 years later, Ted Jacobs coined the term “mutual enactment.” It was really the same as what Levenson was saying, that is, we get caught up in the interaction, pulled in by the patient, to reenact the patient’s developmental and current interpersonal experiences. That is, as Levenson said so clearly, with a masochistic patient, we’re always going to be sadistic. So, we are also a bad object. And we’re not just a maternal object, we live out with the patient old and contemporary object experiences until this mutual enactment is deconstructed. It’s a fuller range of participation in the field and much of it is unconscious on the analyst’s part. As well, analysts’ unique personalities and mental states, for better or for worse, always play a role in any therapeutic interaction. I have also been critical of the implicit hierarchy in the notion of analyst as reparative parent-only, since implicitly, the analyst is seen as the healthy adult and the patient as a deficient child. I have been extremely influenced by Sullivan’s, “We are all more simply human than otherwise,” and Racker’s, “The analytic relationship is not one between a well analyst and a sick patient.”

Now, to their credit, Self Psychologists did address this with their concept of “rupture”—there is a rupture in empathy, inevitably. In a long therapy, there are always disruptions of empathy. The analyst doesn’t deny this or call it a projection. They hear the patient regarding how they were actually unempathic or hurtful in other ways. In some contrast, for the Interpersonal outlook, it’s an ongoing relationship, extending beyond ruptures only in specific moments. If our patient is a very self-absorbed person, droning on session after session, I’m likely to be bored and struggling to be able to pay attention over the course of the relationship. And the chances are that mother or father did not pay attention to you or find you very interesting, etc. A transference-countertransference parallel, unconsciously and unwittingly. If you’re a masochist I’m unwittingly going to be a sadist. Not because I try to be a sadist, I just will be one. This will not be an occasional rupture but an ongoing mutual enactment, addressed when either the analyst or patient becomes consciously aware of the pattern.

LC: It’s inevitable that this happens.

IH: The concept of mutual enactment, by the way, is not attributed to Levenson because Levenson called it “transformation,” and Jacobs called it “mutual enactment.” It’s now adopted widely and by most theoretical perspectives, including classical Freudian. In this country classical Freudian is not so classical anymore, for the most part.

LC: Do you feel there were tensions between the Interpersonal and the Relational traditions?

IH: Stephen Mitchell was critical of the Interpersonal group in two different ways, justifiably, I feel. The three founders were Sullivan, Clara Thompson and Erich Fromm. Sullivan did not address the relationship, transference, or attune to countertransference. There was a certain objectivity that he implied by calling himself “an expert in interpersonal relationships.” Very few Interpersonalists in 2023 would call themselves experts. Relationalists in this country wouldn’t call themselves experts. There is a certain objectivity embraced by Sullivan and there is absence of addressing transference and using countertransference. So that was one criticism of the traditional Interpersonalists. There are a few of them that exist now.

The other was of a different kind of Interpersonalist; the Erich Fromm kind, who was very, very challenging and confrontational. Steve Mitchell called it: “I nailed you; I got you.” That’s kind of aggressive. In the earlier part of my career I was very much like that. I think—I hope—less so now. I was very influenced by Erwin Singer, who was a disciple of Erich Fromm. And Benjamin Wolstein as well, who was probably the best supervisor I ever had. Well, both of them were the best. But, in hindsight, in trying to imitate my mentors, I was too confrontational, before accumulating the sensitivity that their years of experience afforded them. We have to have empathy and we have to have challenge. Self Psychologists and Winnicottians lean far too much toward empathy. A lot of the Interpersonalists, myself included, leaned more toward challenge. Mitchell was critical of that, and distinguished Relational from both Sullivan’s and Fromm’s brand of Interpersonal theory of therapeutic action. Parenthetically, I would add Harold Searles to my list of my analytic heroes.

There was tension between the traditions. Those people who were identified as Relational but not trained Interpersonally blamed the Interpersonal group for being either too objectivist or too confrontational, and the Interpersonalists were critical of some Relational analysts for being excessively infantalizing and disrespecting of patients’ adult self states.

LC: Too much holding.

IH: Too much holding and especially for too long. For forever! And you hear my bias.

TB: You see that as infantilizing.

IH: Yeah.

LC: Yeah.

IH: Holding is not infantilizing, per se. Holding is necessary—it’s a question of balance. Relational is an umbrella term. They call it “under the tent.” Except for drive theorists, it’s a very big tent. There are many Relationalists who are Interpersonal, and I believe, have had the most impact. Relationalists were trained in Self Psychology, Relationalists were trained Winnicottian, Relationalists were trained Kleinian, and Relationalists were even trained Lacanian, and I can’t understand for a moment how Lacanians could possibly call themselves Relational. I consider myself, for example, an Interpersonal-Relational analyst. Then there is the whole political part, there is a very big political part of this tension. It’s very, very relevant but would take up too much space to address this here.

LC: If you don’t mind we’d love to hear it.

TB: Yes, we want to go there.

IH: This all started at NYU Postdoc, in the early 1970s. The Freudians and the Interpersonalists fought all the time; they mostly hated each other, not just based on theoretical differences but personally, too. They vetoed each other’s courses and their respective supervisory appointments. Not a great environment or role model for a candidate. Then, finally, someone came in and said, Damn, let’s have two separate educational tracks so we don’t keep killing each other. That’s how the two tracks were formed. This is while I was still a candidate, I think it was 1972. So that made for peace—the two tracks still disliked each other but didn’t interfere any longer with one another.

Then after Greenberg and Mitchell’s 1983 book, a few Interpersonal supervisors: Mitchell, Philip Bromberg, Jim Fosshage, Emmanuel Ghent and Bernie Freeland, wanted to expand the Interpersonal track and include some Object Relations thinking because of the similarities they saw between Object Relations theory and Interpersonal. The Interpersonal senior faculty said that this stuff isn’t Interpersonal—too many Freudian words, too much Freudian language. “It’s too Freudian!” Basically, partly out of ignorance, they totally insulted and alienated this subgroup within the Interpersonal track.

Basically this sub group said, “screw you,” and they formed a third track—the Relational track.

LC: And that’s how the Relational track came to be.

IH: That’s how the Relational track became differentiated. And the Relational track included some better teachers and much more prominent analysts and writers than the Interpersonal track, which at that time really only had three people who were publicly known: Levenson, Wolstein and Erwin Singer. Two of them were very confronting characters. So most of the candidates found the Relational people—not only were they much more prominent in the field, like Mitchell —they were softer people as a group and much less argumentative. Students liked them, and this was well after I was a candidate. Greenberg and Mitchell’s book was in 1983. The Relational track officially said screw you to the Interpersonal track in 1988. By that time, I was a graduate (1975) of the Interpersonal track. The younger students of the ‘80’s were much more influenced by the Relational cohort. So, the now very prominent people like Jessica Benjamin and Adrienne Harris and Jody Davies and Lew Aron and Beatrice Beebe and Muriel Dimen and Joyce Slochower, for examples, became identified with the Relational track.

LC: I was going to ask you, where were the women, and you just brought them in! Happy to hear them.

IH: In the Interpersonal track of that generation, which is a little younger than my generation, practically nobody published. I was one of the few people from the Interpersonal track, though later, Ann D’Ercole, who just wrote the biography of Clara Thompson, published. Mary-Joan Gerson published. Bob Prince published. But the real powerhouses of that generation were those above, who identified as Relational. They became, obviously, because of their written contributions, leaders in our field. Students at NYU clearly preferred their courses and their supervision. Even more, they were all graduates of Postdoc.

LC: But there still is an Interpersonal track at NYU, right?

IH: Yes. But there were some people—it’s so complicated—who were part of the Relational track as teachers and faculty who considered themselves, then and now, as Interpersonal-Relational. I consider myself Interpersonal-Relational. Prominent are Philip Bromberg, Donnel Stern, Darlene Ehrenberg, Tony Bass. In personal conversation, both Mitchell and Aron acknowledged the powerful impact of their Interpersonal forbearers.

LC: Yet Tony Bass is identified as being Relational.

IH: He went through the program, much after I did, and he resonated toward the Relational teachers and supervisors, even though his personal analyst was prominently Interpersonal. Currently, given the extremely important contributions of Philip Bromberg and Donnel Stern in particular, Interpersonal psychoanalysis is now more in the conversation. Both have identified as Interpersonal and Relational, even though they have taught in the Relational track. Don Stern, who’s a good personal friend, wanted to join the Interpersonal track and those old and senior foolishly rejected him.

LC: Why?

IH. Before answering, I just want to make note of how much the Postdoc Interpersonal track has changed. The era of fighting and excluding is long gone and as well, there are many more faculty who prominently publish.

LC: Back to “why” Stern was rejected?

IH: I don’t want to start naming names, but the idiot who interviewed him probably just didn’t like him.

LC: I see. [Laughs]

IH: I have written about my dreadful experience, too.

LC: Really? Why do you think they had rejected you, since you had already graduated?

IH: I was first nominated to be on the faculty of the Interpersonal track in 1980, five years post graduation. I graduated when there was no such term as Relational, eight years before Greenberg and Mitchell’s book. But because I hadn’t written anything at that time—my first time published was in 1981—my rejection was personal, between me and a couple of senior faculty members. I had been for some time their darling, you know; nominated to be supervisor less than five years after I graduated, but then I became an antagonist to two very key people, for personal reasons. So. I was not part of the Interpersonal track…even though my wife, Willa [Colbert] eventually was and my best friend, Paul Kessel, was. It was a very awkward 20 years before I eventually was embraced. By that time, my antagonists were old and near retirement. My wife was in the Interpersonal track and I was completely outside, and that’s part of the reason we started the Manhattan Institute. I personally wanted a home because I had been excommunicated from my home for over 20 years.

LC: I thought you were excommunicated for starting the Manhattan Institute.

IH: That is only partly correct. There were two very central NYU Postdoc senior administrative faculty in those years. I am not going to name names. I named names, once. There is a book by Steve Kuchuck, Clinical Implications of the Psychoanalyst’s Life Experience: When the Personal Becomes Professional. I have a chapter describing my miseries of being excommunicated in great detail. At one point the Interpersonal track started softening towards me, but after starting the Manhattan Institute, and later, becoming part of the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, these hardened them once again. The two who I refer to as my antagonists had originally been very supportive of The Manhattan Institute, though as things developed, the seven founders had some disagreements with our senior supporters. As the first and most strident co-director, I was the lightning rod for their wrath. As well, those same individuals were very bitter about the success of the Relational track and Dialogues and in spite of everything, they viewed me as betraying them by joining the new journal’s editorial board in 1991.

LC: Wow. You were wandering in the desert. So why exactly did you all start the Manhattan Institute?

IH: It’s an immensely personal story. It was first my idea, though me, Paul Kessel and Willa equally decided to do it. It was my idea for two particular reasons: they weren’t excommunicated from the Interpersonal track so they had somewhat of a home, although they were very sympathetic to me. After all, I was married to Willa and close friends with Paul. But ICP comes into the equation.

LC: Okay. We want this to be juicy.

IH: This is juicy. One year after graduating Postdoc, when I was still in the very good graces of the Interpersonal faculty, Paul Kessel and I were invited to join the faculty at ICP. ICP was purported to be the only Interpersonal institute in town, outside of the White Institute and one half of NYU Postdoc. Founders of ICP were graduates of White, and they self-identified as Interpersonal. But when Paul and I got there we found them totally Self Psychological and Winnicottian. And, so I was—not Paul, so much—very outspoken and critical and as well, pretty damn self-destructive. I was extremely critical of these people who invited me to join their institute. It was very indiscreet. I was critical of them to my supervisees, and in the class I taught, and both Paul and I emphasized the importance of using countertransference, which ICP seniors thought was a kind of wild psychoanalysis. They fired us. Actually, they asked us to resign. We refused to resign because we said we wanted it to be clear why we were being fired, so it all came out in the open.

For me, there was no more NYU and ICP fired me. So, I had a real desperate need for a psychoanalytic community. That’s number one, for my pushing to start the Manhattan Institute. Number two was that it felt like there was a market. I mean, I was always a very ambitious person. That’s why I eventually wrote so many damn articles. I/we felt there was a market for another institute, since ICP wasn’t really Interpersonal and NYU only accepted people with doctorates. There were many social workers that had absolutely no place to go if they wanted exposure to Interpersonal psychoanalysis. We thought there was a huge market that mostly consisted of social workers.

So that’s how the Manhattan Institute got started.

LC: That’s a great story! I’m glad that we [social workers] were there for you, that you created a place for us to be there for you [laughs].

IH: The three of us, Willa, Paul Kessel and myself, were all friendly with Marcia Pollak, Frank Goldberg, Shelley Kastner and Barbara Waxenberg. We were all friendly from NYU postdoc. None of us, when we first started planning, had more than four years post-graduation ourselves.

And [laughs], to finish off the story: a couple of people from NYU who excommunicated me found yet another reason to dislike me. I was, at first, co-director with Frank Goldberg. Frank was so over committed in his professional life that he was co-director in name only. Basically, I was the director. We were originally supported by NYU postdoc faculty, even though a couple of them were angry at me for other reasons, they were not angry at the other six founders. So, I was co-director, but I was really director. Willa, Paul, Marcia Pollak, Shelly Kastner and Barbara Waxenberg did as much as work as I did. An example of the disagreements among the seven of us founders and a few of the senior Postdoc faculty focused on the requirement for three versus two times per week personal analysis for candidates. One of them was adamant about this, and as an aggressive lightning rod, I was easily blamed for insisting on the traditional Interpersonal three times weekly requirement. However, I was totally undiplomatic and way too aggressive in my views, for my own well being.

LC: Who was adamant about that?

IH: Herb Zucker. He was one of the senior faculty who originally backed us. He was insulted because we kept the three times per week requirement. Except for NIP, we would have been the only other institute who had only a two times per week requirement. We didn’t respect him, if you will. Two candidates at Manhattan Institute were his patients and he refused to see them 3x a week and they ended up dropping out of the institute.

A second insulted senior analyst, Ruth Lesser, was infuriated that we had put, in our booklet, Erwin Signer as one of our senior supporters. He had recently died, and she thought that was dishonorable. Since I was the director in name, I was the lighting rod here as well. By the way, Willa, Paul and I had been very close with Erwin Singer and were he alive, much of what had transpired would likely have gone a different way. One of the other subtexts of Lesser’s significant wrath was related to my year of private supervision with her. She wanted me to continue and although she was a decent supervisor, I wanted a new experience and left after one year—to her, an unmitigated and unforgivable rejection.

See, I decided to name names after all. A lame revenge, as well, it should be clear by now that I was no angel victim. Indeed, I was far too antagonistic and argumentative and self-destructive in those years. This comeuppance was quite a learning experience for me, one that served me well in subsequent years.

LC: I see. I didn’t realize you had gone through all of that, Irwin. That must have been pretty tough.

IH: Yeah. It was pretty bad.

LC: I’ll bet it was. You’ve risen from the ashes.

IH: As I say in this Kuchuck book chapter, ultimately—and it was a long ultimately, being excommunicated benefited me. Because I was so motivated to sort of redeem myself, I started writing like crazy. Five years after graduation I was nominated as a supervisor. I would have been so happy to have achieved this! I was only going on 40, but I don’t think I would have been as motivated to write if I had embraced the contentment that a faculty appointment would have provided me. I was desperate to both redeem and prove myself and writing was the major vehicle for this. I also campaigned hard to teach and supervise at other institutes; Postgraduate Center for Mental Health and Adelphi Postdoctoral most notably. In the long run, I think being excommunicated worked to my advantage. I both achieved more than I otherwise would have and, as well, became a more humble person.

LC: What drew you to Interpersonal theory, to begin with, and why not the Freudian track?

IH: My analyst was Interpersonal. Period! It’s not just theory that matters… Before I was in analysis, I didn’t know there was a difference among theories. The Interpersonal school was so small. It was restricted to the White Institute, and half of NYU Postdoc and half of Adelphi Postdoc. I didn’t know that there were different orientations and I took a two-year postdoctoral fellowship right after my PhD, at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. It was a great experience. Most of the supervisors and prestigious people there were from New York Psychoanalytic and they were all Freudian. There were a couple people who were different and I did resonate more, but I did not know then that they came from another formal other school. While at Einstein I went into analysis and my analyst was from White and I strongly identified with my analyst. It was an accident that I was referred to him. I didn’t ask for an analyst in the Interpersonal world. If had been referred to a Freudian analyst and I liked that analyst and the way he worked, I probably would have become a liberal Freudian. By the way, it had to be a “he.” I was really looking for a man with whom to identify, in the professional dimension.

TB: Could we get a little more personal, here? How did you come to psychoanalysis?

IH: I knew. Since my undergraduate years, I wanted to be a psychoanalyst.

TB: How did you know?

IH: [Laughs.] This is all very personal. Do you want it that personal, and not just about the Institute and about my Interpersonal identity?

TB: We want it to be that personal.

IH: As high school graduation approached, I thought I wanted to be an accountant. I had an accountant uncle who was the only college graduate on either side of that generation of my family. He was also the only one who earned a really good living. I thought, I’ll be an accountant also, and I went to Baruch, to the City College School of Business Administration. The majority of students were accounting majors. However, in contrast, the faculty in the psychology department were all in personal analysis, or had been. Some of them had graduated from institutes and as well, some were very charismatic teachers. They talked about sex all the time, and this seemed great to my late teen self! They were so relaxed talking about sex and all kinds of other personal things because they had all gone through a personal analysis. I said, “Shit. I want to do this!” I wanted to be so free in expression and comfortable with myself, as they were.

LC: And talk about sex.

IH: [Laughs.] I wanted to be free in every way, as they appeared. I wanted to be an analyst because, look at what it did for them. I was not a great student. The only graduate school I got into was the University of Maryland, which was completely behavioristic. I thought that I was in the department of zoology. If they had known one wanted to be an analyst in the future, they would likely have kicked that individual out of the program. I had some analytic supervisors working at my internship and in the Veterans Administration in Washington, D.C. This was my oasis. So, I always knew that I wanted to be an analyst but I had no idea there were different analytic schools. I could think of some analysts in the Freudian group in NYU Postdoc who I probably would have liked as analysts.

LC: I think [Sandor] Ferenczi was seen by Ben Wolstein as an early Interpersonalist, wasn’t he?

IH: Only after Diaries game out.

LC: But, he’s claimed by the Relational school. Haven’t you written about Ferenczi as an Interpersonal analyst? How do you see Ferenzci? So much has been written about him in recent years.

IH: Ferenczi is basically the founder of the Interpersonal and the British Middle School of Object Relations. There are a lot of different Ferenczis; we have this period and that period. He influenced Balint, who influenced Winnicott. There was the nurturing, good enough mother Ferenczi. He influenced Winnicott profoundly. That was a big part of Ferenczi. The Interpersonal part was the mutual analysis Ferenczi. The recognition that the analyst as a subjective other has a huge impact on the analysis. And that was the Interpersonal Ferenczi. Sullivan knew about that Ferenczi, and he sent Clara Thompson over there to be analyzed by Ferenczi, which she did. In those days analysis was six months or nine months. She went to Hungary and was analyzed and came back and influenced Sullivan, but despite this, Ferenczi was not really in the Interpersonal conversation for some time. Levenson didn’t write about him. Fromm didn’t. But when Ferenczi’s diaries came out, Wolstein in particular was very taken with him. He became a major advocate of Ferenczi.

LC: Wasn’t Wolstein analyzed by Clara Thompson?

IH: Right, so there was probably some transmission, whether explicit or implicit, because he was analyzed by Clara Thompson.

LC: We talked about many strands of Relational under the Relational umbrella, but what about this concept of Intersubjectivity? Now people use that quite a bit. Do you see the Interpersonal theories woven into that?

IH: There was Jessica Benjamin’s Intersubjectivity, and Robert Stolorow’s Intersubjectivity. The terms are used very differently. Jessica Benjamin used it in terms of recognition of the subjectivity of the other. That is, basically, analytic growth was helping the patient evolve to see the analyst as other, and appreciate people in general as other, that is, not being only influenced by one’s own narcissistic psychology, if you will, intersubjective.

Stolorow basically plagiarized, thinking that he discovered Intersubjectivity. He wrote this book, Faces in the Cloud, where he spoke of all the major theorists as faces on a veritable Mount Rushmore and, like Donald Trump, wanting to be part of our Mount Rushmore, Stolorow wanted his face in the cloud. He rediscovered Sullivan’s revolutionary psychoanalytic conception of participant observation and changed the name to Intersubjectivity. I wrote a brief response to a Stolorow article, in a letter to the editor of an analytic newsletter, some years back. I had just read this Stolorow article and he seemed totally compatible with me, yet he hadn’t cited any Interpersonalists at all. He was as Interpersonal as I was with regard to patient and analyst as subjects of mutual influence. He wrote back to the editor claiming that all devotees of particular points of view tended to reject new ideas as really the same as their own. No resolution here. To me, Stolorow, a very smart guy and from his writing, a good clinician, basically plagiarized Interpersonal thinking and gave it a new name.

TB: I’m curious what you have to say about some of the psychoanalytic theorists that we don’t include in training at our institute, the ones likely not fitting into the Interpersonal-Relational realm but that are still considered contemporary, some of which new candidate mentees find interesting and have brought up with me as a side note. You mentioned earlier there was a Relational Lacan but you couldn’t see that. Could you say more about Jacques Lacan?

IH: Very few people understand Lacan. I couldn’t tell you one thing that I understood even after trying to read him a number of times, other than he takes the privilege to solely determine how long a session will last. One person arbitrarily deciding when to stop reflects a dictatorship. This, to me, is anything but Relational or Interpersonal in spirit. This said, I really can’t say more because I just don’t at all understand his thinking.

TB: What about Laplanche?

IH: Laplanche is of recent tremendous interest but I don’t know a damn thing about him either, and until recently, I don’t think most people knew much about Laplanche. There has been a real Laplanche explosion in the last five or ten years. I’m not sure what is so appealing because I am pretty ignorant. I don’t want to take the trouble to become less ignorant, for in my very minimal exposure, he sounded overly theoretical. Not speaking only about Laplanche, specifically, though, our field is plagued by overly intellectualized and convoluted theory. Like Levenson and Wolstein before me, I think this is a major impediment to clinical practice. As Donald Spence has shown, we always confirm what our theories tell us to look for. Too big an issue to go further with in this forum.

Maybe I’ve embraced Interpersonalized thought because it’s the only perspective that I understand. Indeed, it is very commonsensical and pragmatic. That is, to understand people, you look at the history of their relationships with their unique personal and cultural experience and how these internalizations unconsciously motivate the way they see and act with the world. That’s enough theory for me. Another appeal of the Interpersonal tradition is that it is as close to atheoretical and jargon-free as possible.

TB: And the relevance of Carl Jung?

IH: Him too? More excessive theory and considerable mysticism, too. Aside from possibly having been a Nazi, he is way too mystical for my taste. I don’t think, with a limited number of courses, we have the space to teach him. There are many intelligent Jungians, but I don’t think he is significant enough in contemporary psychoanalysis to be worthy of significant study, even bracketing his possible personal fascism. That’s my best answer.

LC: When you decided you would make an institute that accepted social workers, how did you find people to train, without the internet?

IH: Let’s see. 1981 was the first class. How did we find them? I don’t know how we made it in the public domain…

LC: Were you all working at agencies?

IH: None of us were. There was a newsletter, something was publicized in NASW. We also advertised in the psychiatric nurse newsletter but never got any people from there.

TB: You opened up training to social workers in 1981, and now, as of 2013, the institute opened up the world of psychoanalytic training to those, like me, who are curious minds from other disciplines. I wonder how you see the field responding to analysts from nonclinical backgrounds?

IH: Jim Traub deserves all the credit for our LQP program. He set up the whole thing, with a huge amount of labor. He was supported, but he did everything. Here’s a summary of the history, which goes beyond LQP. Once upon a time, in this country, the only people who were called psychoanalysts were people who graduated from the American Psychoanalytic Association institutes, or the White Institute or Theodore Reik’s institute, NPAP. And, those who were not MDs were referred to as “lay analysts” by the hegemonic APsaA. For the most part, one had to be a psychiatrist to be admitted to an APsaA psychoanalytic institute in the first place. Well, there was a lawsuit in the 1980s, where psychologists wanted to get into the game and they sued for inclusion and they won the lawsuit. Plus, number two: the number of candidates that the APsaA institutes, even in the really prestigious ones like New York Psychoanalytic, were diminishing. So, not only did they lose the lawsuit, they concluded that they’d better let these psychologists in lest they were going to dry up for lack of enough candidates. That helped for a while. Then, the APsaA institutes, even with psychologist candidates, weren’t getting enough total candidates, once again. They said, implicitly, we’d better open this up to social workers too; we need more business.

Opening up to psychologists and social workers would never have happened if business had been good. The White Institute, in its early days, used to take a class of ten or something and only two of those were allowed to be psychologists and the rest had to be MDs. That had to change. It was basically for survival. That’s also how social workers became part of the equation.

Then, even with social workers, once again there weren’t enough candidates. So someone said, “Well, aren’t there smart, interesting people out there who have degrees: college degrees, advanced degrees? They’re smart and they have interesting backgrounds. We’re not going to survive unless we get more people.” So now there’s you, Tricia, you and your graduate cohort. That’s how LQP came into existence. That’s the story, according to my cynical inclinations.

LC: Who fought for this, to have LQPs?

IH: It didn’t start with Manhattan Institute. I don’t even know who started it. NPAP (Reik’s institute), actually had been doing that forever, sort of off the grid. There was, at the time, much objection to people with no clinical experience or background seeing patients. So only when it became necessary did other institutes open it up. NIP started, ICP started. Manhattan Institute embraced this, and Jim Traub brought this into fruition with his Herculean efforts.

TB: So you had to do it, Irwin, but you like us, right? You really, really like us and our work?

IH: [Laughs.] Well, yeah, you all are smart, interesting people and I personally am enriched by meeting so many of you. However, I didn’t do anything, Jim Traub and his committee are responsible.

LC: Well, Freud believed in lay analysis and his own daughter Anna Freud was a lay analyst, wasn’t she?

IH: Psychologists-psychoanalysts originally vehemently objected to the term, “lay analyst.” I go crazy when hear that awful and profoundly degrading term.

LC: Okay… Why?

IH: What makes me “lay”? What makes you “lay”? Come on!

LC: I knew you were going to say that. [All laugh.]

IH: What makes me or both of you less a real analyst than a psychiatrist? Both of you should object to that term as vehemently as I do. Psychoanalysis is not a medical specialty and we do not follow a medical model, with diagnosis, except to achieve insurance reimbursements.

LC: I don’t know if you know this history about social workers and psychoanalysis, but during the 1920s, social work was accused of not being a profession, and one of the ways they decided to make it into a profession was to train social workers in psychoanalysis, and to marry social work to Freudian theory.

IH: Where were they training?

LC: That’s a good question. I’ll have to take a look at a book I have. It may have been more informal in the ‘20s and ‘30s. Or it was integrated into social work programs. The book is called The Altruistic Imagination by John Erenreich.

IH: IPTAR and the Freudian Society were quick to accept social workers and also very quick to accept LQP people. At that time they were very traditional Freudians, now they are more contemporary Freudians.

TB: Have you noticed the uptick of psychoanalysis in the ethos? In Treatment came back updated with a black analyst, and Couples Therapy with Postdoc’s Orna Guaralnik, and the NYT’s recent article: “Not your Daddy’s Freud” talks about this return. Can you both comment?

IH: Actually, I know the guy who initiated that Times article. He was in my class at the White Institute last semester. He was an LQP candidate—very smart and well educated. That was a very pro-psychoanalytic and pro-LQP article.

TB: Why is psychoanalysis coming back now?

LC: I’m finding more patients coming and saying “I’ve tried CBT and DBT.” They say, “I don’t want that. It’s not enough. I want to look at my relationships and look at my history.”

IH: The other reason is that what constitutes psychoanalysis is not necessarily classical Freudian orientation anymore—three to four times a week on the couch. Interpersonal psychoanalysis originally went down from daily to 3x a week. But also, I consider everything I do to be psychoanalysis, even 1x a week, and I never use the couch anyway. It’s not ideal—3x a week is better. I wish all my patients could come that often but who the hell can afford to go 3x a week if you’re not getting a reduced candidate fee? How many people in this world can afford a normal fee, 3x each week, not to mention the time involved? Though now the time factor is easier because both we and our patients can work from home. Psychoanalysis has loosened up quite a bit.

Back in the early 1980s, Merton Gill wrote brilliantly about the changing definitions of what isn’t, and what is, psychoanalysis. For him and certainly for me, the intrinsic definition relates to the analysis of transference and analysts’ productive use of countertransference, in order to address transference. What he calls the extrinsic definitions are the use of the couch and 3-4 times per week sessions. His writing has been hugely important to me and a big element in what I teach.

LC: Tell us about how you came to write your recent book, Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Intense Involvement in Sports. I love that you found a way to look at sports from a psychoanalytic perspective.

IH: First of all, I am one of three editors, though the book came to fruition because of my personal interest. Since I was nine years old, I’ve been super-interested in sports, as a recreational player when younger and an avid fan to this day. I don’t closely follow tennis even though I have played a lot, but baseball, football and basketball have all been very important to me. In adult years it has taken added importance because of the interest among my two children and my four grandchildren. When a kid, sports had a huge impact on separating me from my insular relationship with my mother, and as well, giving me male heroes with whom to identify. Two of my co-editors wanted to write about sports as well, Philip Blumberg as a gifted writer and editor, and Bob Watson as a fellow former participant and current fan.

LC: I read the introduction and loved what you said about affiliation and your mood as it relates to playing.

IH: It’s such a universal thing. People all over the world are interested in soccer and now basketball. All over the world soccer fans in particular are fanatical. However much of a fan I am, soccer fans in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Europe are more personally affected by the ups and downs of their beloved teams.

LC: Irwin, we have to stop now, but thank you so much for giving us this opportunity to sit with you and talk about your ideas, your history and the history of the Institute and the history of how Interpersonal theory was a major contributor to the Relational model.

TB: This talk has been a real gift. What a wonderful idea, Lorraine. Thank you for inviting me to sit in. And thank you for your inspiration, Irwin. You are a legendary player in my book, as teacher, supervisor and writer.

 

Irwin Hirsch, PhD supervises and teaches at the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, the William Alanson White Institute, the NYU Postdoctoral Program and at other psychoanalytic institutes nationally. He has published six books and numerous book chapters and journal articles. Dr. Hirsch is one of the seven founders of the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is in private practice in Manhattan.

Lorraine Caputo, LCSW is Director of the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, Director of the Certificate Program in Trauma Studies at MIP, and faculty and training analyst at MIP and at the Institute for Expressive Analysis. She is in private practice in Manhattan, and in Maplewood, New Jersey.

Tricia Brock, MFA, LP, NCPsyA is the editor of this blog and a graduate of the Manhattan Institute. She is in private practice in Manhattan and she is also licensed in Vermont.

 

 

Irwin Hirsch’s virtual book party for Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Intense Involvement in Sports is scheduled for Saturday, 10/14/2023. Stay tuned for future announcements!

 

If you liked this post, may we recommend:

Why Psychoanalysis? By Irwin Hirsch, PhD

Bearing Witness to Collective Racial Trauma and Public Health Crisis: An Antidote to Denial and Disavoval by Lorraine Caputo, LCSW

A Tale of Two Licensing Exams by Tricia Brock, MFA, LP, NCPsyA

A Bigger Kind of Cat: An Exit Interview with Former MIP Co-Director, Veronica Csillag, LCSW