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Abstract
In connection with a conference in memory of Herbert Rosenfeld in 2014 in his home town of Nuremberg, from which he had to flee in 1935, the author did some research on the work of this outstanding, later British, psychoanalyst in Germany. The first results are presented here. How the first links came about remains unclear, but a few of his articles were published in German from 1955, and in the 1970s he held occasional seminars in Munich. His contacts with colleagues from the German Psychoanalytic Association (DPV) at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s (until his death in 1986), especially through a supervision group he led, seem, however, to have been the most influential ones. Rosenfeld transmitted a particularly “experience-near” approach to the patient, which also acknowledged and took seriously (self) destructive elements in the transference and countertransference. Over the following years and decades, a number of colleagues wished to deepen this approach. How this line was further developed is illustrated by outlining Gottfried Appy’s clinical description of an intrusive speechlessness. Rosenfeld’s ideas on the pernicious effect of idealizing destructive elements are especially stressed, as they contributed to thinking about the entanglements with Nazi Germany and in addition are still useful in analytic practice, out of which they were developed.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the generous support of many colleagues. Special thanks go to Edna O’Shaughnessy and Antje Vaihinger, Ludger Hermanns, Ross Lazar, Georg Matejek and Wilhelm Skogstad for valuable advice.
Notes
1 In the interview with Grosskurth in 1982 (published in Psyche in 1989), Rosenfeld mentions being expelled by the Nazis. Fortunately, he managed to obtain a one-year contract at Guy's Hospital in London leading up to the examination in English. He had subsequently been aiming not for psychotherapy training, but for a work opportunity (which turned out to be difficult). However, the Tavistock Clinic accepted him on a two-year psychotherapy curriculum. In Impasse and Interpretation, he mentions, in the context of his dissertation “On so-called ‘multiple absences' in childhood” (Rosenfeld, Citation1935), that he was no longer allowed to treat patients in Germany. In this dissertation, he gives an overview of 71 cases described in the literature and presents two clinical cases in more detail, for which he thanks his supervisor, Prof. Erich Bejamin, whose teaching license was revoked because he was a Jew (he emigrated to the USA in 1937).
2 Personal communication to G. Matejek (June 4, 2014), where the skepticism of “wild analysis” was mentioned in another concrete context.
3 He would have liked contact with German universities and therefore regretted Mentzos’ withdrawal from the supervision group (personal communication by A. Vaihinger to the author, April 6, 2013).
4 Each time they met in Heidelberg; once (spring 1985) they worked together for a few days in La Palma, where Canzler had a holiday home. The members changed over the years, departing members being replaced by others. One member, who had learned about the group through H. Schoenhals, wrote, for example, that she had been part of the group for about three years and there had been 16 members.
5 There is a mention in the summary of the workshop on “On the return of the repressed identification with national socialism in the psychoanalytic process,” by K.H. Schäfer and R. Rehberger (1984), that H. Beland posed the question “What are the reasons why the repressed identification with the Nazi generation has been ignored for decades in analytic treatments” (Rosenfeld, Citation1985). I understand this to be a question to the analysts and their identification.
6 To be in possession of “the truth,” which the candidate defended against, was a variation that was not recognized as such for long periods as the purpose of the analysis was to acknowledge one's defences and to overcome again and again a not-wanting-to-know.
7 Next to the ones I mention later, particularly his ideas on hypochondria and psychosomatic symptoms as “psychotic islands” (Rosenfeld, Citation2004) and on impasse (Frank, O'Shaughnessy & Weiss, 2012). Steiner (Citation2008) provides a comprehensive overview of Rosenfeld's work.
8 I needed much time and many hours of supervision by various London colleagues before I could build up confidence in my own experience of what was and remains helpful, and what was of theoretical interest but did not suit me in practice – a complex and painful process that was valuable in itself.
9 Looking at the discussion on potential training candidates, one can repeatedly observe a phenomenon that Irma Brenman Pick (Citation2011) among others highlighted. Instead of discussing strengths and weaknesses in the spirit of knowing and being in contact internally with the corresponding feelings, pathologies are isolated in the candidate in a spirit of (apparent) knowledge (and superiority), the less one seems affected by them. Money-Kyrle had vividly described this group phenomenon decades before (Frank, Citation2012).
10 A colleague put it like this: “HR was very good at recognising and taking up not just the destructive, but also traces of the constructive make-up.”
11 I have been told this explicitly by some. In a published interview with the 90-year-old Eric Brenman in 2010, he remembered that one could go for advice in supervision with Rosenfeld without having to disguise one's helplessness.
12 One can easily imagine that this had to do with the difficulty of bearing unbearable feelings of guilt and shame. The postwar period was dominated by denial and manic self-reparation, and a containing counterpart was needed to be able to face this.
13 Alongside fierce discussions, relevant research began, which resulted in an exhibition “Here life continues in a very peculiar way … ” on the occasion of the 34th IPA Congress, which took place in Hamburg in 1985. The phases of the debate were variously described. I would like to mention that Beland (Citation1988) described an interpretation of some group processes of German postwar psychoanalysis as a reaction to the unconscious presence of the Nazi crimes, starting with the secret illusory identity of the first decades (“We are part of/on the side of the persecuted”).
14 The same was conveyed to Rosenfeld. Tilo Held remembered that he had heard Rosenfeld say at a conference in Germany how peculiar the early meetings with analysts in postwar West Germany had been. “They knew everything already and saw no reason for further learning.” Later on, this changed in a very positive way (personal communication, August 1, 2014).
15 Demetting's review of the German translation 17 years later in Psyche also emphasized Rosenfeld's “clinical relevance” (Citation1983, p. 272).
16 In re-reading the literature, I noticed that Rosenfeld frequently made comparisons with child analysis. The reason for this is obvious – just as Klein sought to understand the children's unconscious phantasies from their immediate actions and associations during play, Rosenfeld tried to find access to his patients who made few or difficult to understand verbal utterances, so that he had to consider the “total situation” in the immediate communication of the moment to arrive at an appropriate interpretation.
17 Colleagues from Frankfurt, Freiburg, Gießen, Heidelberg, Köln, and Stuttgart-Tübingen took part in the supervision group.
18 Later on, Canzler referred to Rosenfeld, when the patient experienced fragmented, truncated interpretations not as helpful, but as anxiety-provoking and threatening (1982; see 1990, p. 206). He referred to “Rosenfeld 1982” – although there is no bibliography – but we do not whether he is perhaps referring to a personal communication with Rosenfeld.
19 ∼For an example of how supervision can be helpful, see Frank & Böhme (Citation2014).
20 Wangh (Citation1996) was later to refer to Appy's work to show how paranoia manifested itself as a defensive arrogance and to demonstrate that, in his view, these symptoms of a paranoid phase were particularly distinct around 1980 (p. 117). One cannot but investigate “the silent internal objects” in order to overcome the temptation that “the alternative idealization or complete rejection” represents for us all (p. 118).
21 I found it interesting that in “Living and dying. Status and function of internal objects in psychosomatic illnesses,” Matejek (Citation1999, p. 100) worked out in detail that a patient with colitis experienced being intruded upon in the form of the analyst as “a persecutory object who inflamed her intestine.”
22 As a training candidate, I was impressed at the time by the intensity of the thinking, the brutal honesty with which bits of self-analysis took place in public, but for many reasons I only understood partially. In hindsight, I would say that the phenomenon described was an unquestioned part of my internal and external world. I did not have the freedom that could have enabled me to question and begin to work this through.
23 I am not sure that the term is well chosen as it does not convey the active nature of the phenomenon Appy describes. Hence my thought that Beschweigen (to “do silence to it”) possibly catches the meaning more precisely. Totschweigen (silence as if it were dead or had never happened) as a possible alternative has lost the impact of its original meaning by colloquial use.
24 Rosenfeld spoke of the hypnotic quality of projective identification (as long as it has not been understood).
25 Referred to by Loch in Citation1965: “Starting with Klein's important insight into the mechanisms of projective identification and their antecedents, which gave us the means to tackle this task, it was Rosenfeld … and W. R. Bion in particular, who further developed these techniques … What is important here is that the different splitting of the person (independent of its origin in the ego, super-ego or id or of the precursors of these structures) and their projection into the therapist is recognised and gradually understood as a consequence of violent, unbridled aggression” (p. 182). Loch was referring here to the papers that had been published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. In Citation1967, he again referred to English-language papers, this time on depression.
26 I heard from R. Lazar, who came to Munich himself in 1978, that these took place in Kahleyss-Neumann's house, usually around New Year, as Rosenfeld liked to spend New Year's Eve dancing on the Elmau. The Rosenfeld seminars ended in 1982 with his accident on an icy Munich path, when he sustained a complicated fracture. According to Lazar, Kahleyss-Neumann was a somehow controversial personality who tried – as one of the first – in her way to import Kleinian thinking and technique to Germany, but did not always succeed. Nevertheless, some colleagues learned in this way about the existence of Kleinian analysis and helpfully found their way to London. U. May remembered: ‘Mrs K. periodically invited Rosenfeld to Munich. I think it was when Rosenfeld was on his way into the mountains to go skiing. That's how my fantasy remembers it in any case. I took part in the seminars myself and remember the atmosphere very well” (personal communication, June 4, 2014).
27 I have tried, so far in vain, to contact her ex-husband, Martin Kahleyss, who referred to Rosenfeld in a footnote in a publication in Citation1979 in the context of case material (“I am indebted to Dr. Herbert A. Rosenfeld for my understanding of the phenomenon of emptiness”), without citing Rosenfeld's work in the bibliography, so one might conclude that he had received this in supervision.
28 It seems as though Rosenfeld did not feel quite comfortable with this. He never published this presentation in English. Did he feel pressurized as he saw himself predominantly as a clinician rather than a theoretician (see R. Steiner, Citation2008). In any case, Steiner said that he had tried to convince Rosenfeld of the importance of his work on destructive narcissism and its relevance in understanding aspects of Fascism and Nazism (p. 54). John Steiner remembered that that Rosenfeld only reluctantly accepted such an application (personal communication March 15, 2013).
29 Wilde's “Thoughts after Rosenfeld's presentation on ‘Narcissism and aggression‘” at Wiesbaden can be read in DPV-Informationen No. 2, in the 1988 Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse presentation from 1986 (Wilde, Citation1987b).
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Claudia Frank
Claudia Frank, Priv.-Doz. Dr. med., is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Stuttgart, and a training analyst of the DPV/IPA. From 1988 to 2001, she was at the Department for Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics of the University in Tübingen, and from 1998 to 2001 was in charge of the chair of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and psychosomatics. She is a guest member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Since 2016, she has been chair of the training committee of the DPV. Her publications have been on technique, the theory and history of psychoanalysis (e.g. a monograph about Melanie Klein’s first child analyses in Berlin), as well as papers in applied psychoanalysis. She is co-editor of the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse and, together with Heinz Weiss, editor of various books on Kleinian psychoanalysis.