Dr. Bibring is an international figure in psychoanalysis. She was a student and colleague of Sigmund Freud, the first woman clinical professor at the Harvard Medical School and Chief of the Psychiatric Service at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. She is past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Cope is Professor of Surgery, Emeritus, at Harvard Medical School, and Senior Consulting Surgeon of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Today, Dr. Bibring and Dr. Cope will conduct an informal interview about some of her experiences as a psychoanalyst.

Dr. Bibring, what an opportunity for me, a surgeon, to come and ask you about psychoanalysis. How come that you went into Medicine? 1918.

Nineteen-eighteen. Now, it’s hard for me to say exactly why I chose Medicine, but I can try. You know, I was in Humanistic Gymnasium, eighteen years and we went in that period over most areas eclectic, to be learned about, so predominant Greek and Latin, we went into History and into Natural Sciences, Physics and Mathematics, practically everything one could really consider. So that means that eight years, from 10 to 18, there came the opportunity to choose to decide. And finally I decided Medicine it is, and it stayed for good.

So you went into Medicine—-did you know you were going to go into Psychiatry when you started in Medicine? This was just at the end of World War I.

Now, I heard about Freud two years before I went to medical school. In the gymnasium I was pretty young, seventeen, and it was in the seventh grade in Psychology class, and one of the students got up and told us that her father, a physician in Vienna, had played cards with a friend, Dr. Freud, every Saturday, and Freud told him and the other men in the group that academic psychology figured out some very important parts of what is going on psychologically in people and what motivates them, and what influences their lives, though they are not aware of it. And he called these factors unconscious factors.

Now, I was very curious, and on my way home I dropped in at... who was then the publisher of Freud and asked for some of his writings, and he gave me Wit and Its Relationship to the Unconscious. I didn’t like it at all. It was confusing; it wasn’t even interesting but I didn’t give up. I went back and asked for another book. At that time, he gave me The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Now, that was very different—-thought provoking--it was very interesting.

And you were still in the gymnasium.

In the seventh grade. Two years later I was in medical school, and I remember very well, I was sitting in my Anatomy Lecture between two returned veterans of the First World War, it had just ended. It was 1918. Their names were Edward Bibring and Madame Reich. Both of them became rather known in this country and abroad later on. Now, a little note was passed around and on it was written “Those colleagues who want to know more about certain subjects which are not taught in medical school, or are not taught well, should stay back after the lecture.” Signed, Otto Fenichel, also a man who became very known as a leading psychoanalyst later on.

I told my two neighbors I was very interested in it. This man is very good, I knew him from the time we played in the sandbox together and somehow he always stayed there. Then there was another student who wanted to become an endocrinologist and somebody wanted to go into internal medicine. And we set up a seminar—a new seminar—to study these things.

Just you students?

It was all five.

Bibring, and Fenichel, and you.

No, and two others, which, they got lost and then one went to endocrinology and one into internal medicine. Now, we set up a seminar and used them not to bring the books and we started with very conservative things, with textbooks on endocrinology, and then we read [Friese?], who was a close friend of Freud but didn’t know about that, who had the most interesting idea about human physiology—not a correct one, but interesting.

Then, I think, we read Havelock Ellis’s The Psychology of Sex. And then we had an assignment to report Freud’s contribution to the theory of sex, and the student who had to review it, was Edward Bibring. Now, he came back to our seminar, and he said, “Most interesting, and most important book.” And I piped up and I really got quite embarrassed about this remark the older I got and then I got old enough not to be embarrassed but amused and touched by this very famous man, and a very great man. I read some of his writings.

Now, you mustn’t forget, I was a youngster of seventeen. I’d read two books, whereas these men who were five years my elders, were in the war, prisoners of war in Russia and I was in the luxury of literature and science and could do whatever fed my . . .

And nineteen at the time.

That’s right. So, nobody handed it in for a mark. And we went on, and we were working very hard on it, setting up more and more of these studies, which was later on when we became psychoanalysts, called “The Seminar of the Children”. We were the children at that time. So this is how I got into it.

When did you first meet Freud?

I think at that time already, not only Freud but the other analysts, too, what we did, and maybe there were additional men, I don’t know, whether it still exists, every doctor had office hours set aside, one or two hours in the afternoon, and you could come to them without a carefully arranged appointment. So we went to analysts whose books we’d read, including Freud, and asked him simply, “What does that mean?” “What does he advise we should read after it?” And sometimes we simply debated. And you know, it was in the 1920s, early, there was no Institute in Vienna.

Was this characteristic of the student body? Were there other groups like yours doing, in a sense, original, investigated on your own?

I don’t know. I think they’re all like that. I remember concentrating on what were they doing. For instance . . .

Of course, this wasn’t outlined for you. You had no professor and no course telling you to do this. This was your own initiative.

There was no Institute; we were not spoiled with a routine and programs. We found it quite in order to let in four students that were Stanton, Reich, the two people but were married to each other, to be invited by Freud to be guests in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, which we became. And this is how we met him and this is how our professional lives started.

When was the Institute founded? Or was there never a psychoanalytic institute . . .

I think, you know, if I had known what you’d ask, I would have asked and whatever, looked it up. But I think it was about 1926. Helene Deutsch, who had her clinic in Berlin, would come back to us and told us about an institute in Berlin and how it functioned, and we thought we should have an institute. So we established an institute, making Helene Deutsch the first chairman of the Education Committee; and then we did something very improper. We felt we had no credentials, no formal credentials, so we thought we should have certificates for us. We have a young faculty, never trained but by ourselves, and we really printed certificates, and five of them were issued, signed by Freud and I. Gottschalk and then we all found that this was improper. We discarded all the other certificates. Nobody else got them. But these five exist still in the safety vault or in the Congress, the Library of Congress.

The Institute therefore was not in any sense formally a part of the university?

No.

Did the university recognize what was going on?

Negatively. There was a lot of fight against, aversion against Freud, psychoanalysis.

Was he kept out of the local medical society?

Yes. I tell you, we had a great scandal when we first reported the theory of hysteria, and then the sex problem came up, and it was a real scandal in the medical society. This was really why he could never progress in his career as far as the university was concerned. We all were really somehow looked upon as a little bit outcast. The funny thing is, that my love was Anatomy. It was so clean and so clear and so informative, and I really slowly got more and more into medicine but I had this humanistic background.

But Freud started as an anatomic neurologist, also studying anatomy in detail. Neural anatomy.

But in the last two years of my medical school, Dr. Cope, I matriculated in Philosophy, too. You know, we were not quite as natural scientists as you very often are when you go into Medicine. We were humanists.

There was not at that time a prescribed course?

Yes, in Medicine, yes. But we didn’t keep to it completely, we’d go apart from it but found it important and interesting.

You became a member—-you were a member of the Institute, and then along came Hitler, and the Institute disbanded, or couldn’t work under Hitler’s time?

First of all, the Institute disbanded because it was complicated, but there was a small core of underground analysts who stayed in Vienna. Now, let me try to tell you how this thing developed. We all stayed for all kinds of reasons--responsibilities, or work, or loyalties—-we all knew that it would come. We weren’t naïve.

Because there were Jews among the analysts, but also because of the process, the actual analytic processes which would be devastating to any political body that was trying to, well, to . . .

Sure. But, you know, we had occasion, 1936, already, to go to Detroit, to set up an institute, and we felt we couldn’t do that. You know, you couldn’t just run away. So we stayed. And I remember, the second my husband would even run, and keep everything. But we run with a light heart. That was the test. So it was breaking the heart, too.

Now, I can’t vouch for Freud’s motives but he was 82 and probably didn’t want to be uprooted, and probably hoped, from what he said sometimes, that to stay there might protect the Institute, the publishing house, the documents. He was completely wrong. So, Jones came to Vienna. Ernest Jones.

From London? Ernest Jones.

From London. He persuaded Freud to come to London. Freud insisted that he would go only when some of his editors would also go. So Jones promised the coming emigration visa.

Jones had been a student, years earlier? Now, this is 1938, that Jones came? But Jones was not a contact man. As a psychiatrist, he had been a student in the ‘20s with Freud?

I don’t know exactly when. But he was very active for a long time in the United States, and he introduced, really, to a certain extent. And Putnam . . .

But Putnam was a part of the Symposium at Worcester, at Clark University that was organized by the then president of Clark. But Freud somehow didn’t like the United States.

No, he didn’t. I remember once, even I remember, it wasn’t against American people personally. It was against something which wasn’t so wrong, this kind of, what he felt its business bent, and the fear that the analysis almost become part of it for a certain period and . . .

And it almost did. And he could sense that in American medicine. Wasn’t it 1910 that he came to Worcester? 1910-1920.

Nineteen nine.

And somehow he was put off.

I remember once this little anecdote. We had a meeting in his house and he came in with a letter. He was a very written man, with a letter, and showed us the letter, the appearance of the letter. And there was a slit and the tiny things were slipped into it. The letter was asking the famous professor to send his signature to under, whatever the signed, and to put in ten cents for the stamps.

For the postage.

So somehow it’s part of something that he didn’t like. But I think he was exaggerating.

You’re saying, ‘engrossed’ in what he was doing. That he didn’t . . .

That’s right. He was afraid that he would miss something between—-just before the marketplace, at least he didn’t study the marketplace, but it doesn’t function well in the marketplace.

Yes. We must come back to your own experience when you reached this country, because we still, as a country, at least in the medical profession, are quite suspicious of psychoanalysis, really, aren’t we? He must have sensed that somehow.

But first now, you were in Vienna and then you were invited to Detroit, but in 1936.

We didn’t go. We had a common visa. You know, I still can't say, "visa". It's visom, because it's singular.

Well, there were two of you, so you had two visas.

We had a common visa. Okay, however, and the interesting thing was . . .

I think our audience ought to know something about your Latin. You told me some time ago that when you were in medical school, the professors still, when they were talking about the disease before the patient, is that they talked in Latin. That was, theoretically, so that the patient wouldn’t be worried about what you were talking about. Well, you had to be conversant, fluent in Latin as a medical student.

Well, eighteen years, every day, for an hour.

So we understand why you don’t like us to talk about visas.

Visa. Visa.

All right. That’s an extraordinary cultural difference, because American medicine never had this cultural inhibition, if you will.

No, I understand. I understand and can remember, once we were on a curriculum, outside of, what was this place? Not Endicott House?

Yes, Endicott House.

And I wrote in Greek... because the whole group talked about natural sciences and medicine, and nobody cared for the psyche. And they said something very drastic. I had to go upstairs to take my seat, and I heard Dr. Cope say in this particular facetious way of his, he said: “Dr. Bibring had the audacity to write something here on the table which nobody in the house understands what it means.”

[Laughs]. Well, I, I’m afraid . . .

Now, okay, what was your question?

Well, I wanted to get you to Boston. You were invited to Detroit in 1936, but for various reasons you felt this was not wise, but when Jones . . .

Wise, but not proper.

Because you would be coming alone and forsaking . . .

Well, you know, there is something to that.

Yes, and so you stayed, and then when Jones came with the home office from England inviting Freud and you as a group . . .

Some of his editors.

His editors.

And now, my husband was one of them. And all these editors, interestingly enough, were married to psychoanalytic ladies. So they were couples.

Well, sort of an ‘in-group’, you might say. At any rate, as a body, you went to England. Then in London you joined a group of psychiatrists or analysts who were already practicing analytic type, and then came war.

Yeah. One year, the work was beautiful. Then came the war. Freud died in ’39. The publishing house was bombed. Most of the—-not most but a large percentage of the British psychoanalysts—-at least in the break--evacuated themselves.

Your two boys, when the war came, your two boys were evacuated to the country but you and Dr. Edward Bibring had to stay, for professional reasons, in London.

That’s right, and that was really what bothered me most. They were so serious when the break started. But we really expected that our boys might not see her over the weekend anymore. And then the German invasion was threatened. So [Grovalt?] offered, seriously, that if something happened to us, he would adopt the children. Now, a woman colleague of ours, Minnie Hoffer [?], who had died in the meantime, became an air raid warden, and every morning we went around, either by telephone or personally, to friends to see whether they are still there. This was the situation and then one day, an invitation for my husband to come to Tufts Medical School. Warren Stearns had invited him with an appointment.

Dr. Stearns, who was Professor of Neurology and Dean at Tufts Medical School at that time. Now, your good husband was attached to Tufts. How did you become attached to Harvard? You came in 1942.

Forty-one.

Forty-one. Now, I think our audience ought to know, that although there had been one woman, Dr. Alice Hamilton, who was a professor of Industrial Medicine in the Public Health School, you are the first woman to have been appointed a professor of Medicine, professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. Now, how did that happen?

Circumstances at that time, partly. You know, when we came, we had a number of friends here, former students, colleagues. It was delightful to come to Boston and suddenly to discover how many of our friends were here, and they told us, introduced us into their many ways of life. Now, the interesting thing was that they told us, here in the United States, a doctor gives some service to the hospital. Now, that wasn’t our habit. What we did, we had our own psychoanalytic outpatient clinic which we supported ourselves. It was very interesting and we were told that the Beth Israel Hospital, which is a first-rate hospital, has an outpatient—-that that outpatient wing which is almost exclusively occupied by psychoanalysts in Boston. Now, we were in the outpatient clinic during the war. And so many of our colleagues had to go into service, and somehow they appointed me as the Acting Head of the Outpatient Clinic.

Now, in the health offices, where interns and residents, felt troubled because they had so little teaching, all the big names, they’re gone. So they now came to me and said that I will teach them how my specialty fits into Medicine. So I was very glad to do so. Now, this was something which I didn’t expect to turn out so beautifully. I taught them but the only hour read was from 1:00 to 2:00. Now, they all came and sat down, and half of them fell asleep, because it was after lunch and they were so overworked. So I talked to the other half, and I was sympathetic with them. The next time, the other half was asleep, and some of them were awake, so I acquired the habit of summarizing what I had done the time before. Now, this they never, never forgot. They really became a favorite of theirs, apart from the fact that I think the lectures were really interesting. It’s quite excited over it.

So when Dr. Blumguard became the new Physician in Chief, returning from India after the war, he brought with him some observation, that most of the soldiers, apart from their physical illnesses, had severe psychological disturbances. He had this genius idea that psychiatry really belongs into a general hospital.

That was not until ’48, then.

It was ’46.

Forty-six, oh yes, because his war service in part had been in India.

And I said “No.” You know, I wanted to go back. I told him, I said, I don’t know enough about American hospitals. I have never run a department. I can’t push people around if I know less than they do. And he said so, constantly, he repeated it, “It’s all for the better.” And finally he said something which stopped me in my flight. He said, “You know, this is the way you psychoanalysts always are. When we try to do something psychological with our sick patients, you look down your noses, and you say it’s all wrong. And we say, ‘Come and help us.’ You say, ‘Sorry, I’m too busy.’” And I knew he was right! And it bothered me. And I also admired this exact, wonderful, psychological gimmick he had, to hit me where I’m vulnerable. You know, years later, it turned out that it wasn’t a gimmick. He really meant what he said.

It was an extraordinary thing, and I don’t know that you can really evaluate today what you contributed at that time.

I hope I contributed something.

Well, of course you did. And it was an extraordinary awakening. I have to say it is an awakening because brought up here as a medical student in the ‘20s, then as a young doctor in the ‘30s, we were really, the profession was anti-psychiatric, and anti-women. You know that story about . . .

No I don’t.

You know that when the war came, as the war approached in 1941 just at the time you arrived, there was a thought that maybe Harvard Medical School should admit women. And then the war broke, President Conant felt it clear that it should be considered and he appointed a faculty committee. I had the opportunity of being the youngest member of a committee of six. The chairman of it was the older professor of pathology, Dr. Wolbach. And the meetings of the committee consisted really of finding out how many women were actually in practice who had graduated, and they were in a respectable number. And so, he felt that, five of six of the committee felt, it was quite clear that women should be admitted to the Harvard Medical School and Dr. Wolbach felt it was an emotional attitude, and we came to the faculty meeting, really unprepared to meet specific objections or points. At any rate, the committee proposed to the university and to the faculty, that women be admitted.

Early 1942, just after you arrived. And there were twelve opponents, and there were double the number, approximately 24 who were for it—-of course, including Dr. Blumguard and the Dean, who was a very considerate, thoughtful, mild-mannered man, and Dr. Wislocki, whose wife was a doctor and there were many strong voices for the admission of women.

The senior surgeon of the time, who was the anatomist, by the way—-the surgical anatomist--said he was sorry; women had no place as doctors because everybody knows that in the animal kingdom the intelligence of an animal is directly proportional to the weight of the brain. Rats, all the way up to monkeys, and then human beings. And there was no dispute about that. Women’s brains . . .

Are smaller.

. . . are a hundred grams smaller than men’s; therefore, it’s perfectly clear that women are not as intelligent as men.

And they believed him?

No. No, they fought over it. He, poor man, got very angry and had almost a disastrous hemorrhage the next day. He had an ulcer and he nearly bled to death. But there was an interesting alignment in the faculty: the twelve voices against it were all professors of surgery.

But at any rate, there was an awakening which was coming just at the time to which you unquestionably contributed at the Beth Israel. There’s no doubt that those students, those house officers as you have...

It’s an interesting thing, you know.

It’s as if the man’s eyes were opened to what women might contribute. And so you were properly honored by being made the first woman professor.

Though there are a lot of things now that we need to know. Am I right that our profession doubts, really, the usefulness of psychoanalytical medicine as compared to so-called straight psychiatry? Is that true; do you feel it?

I don’t think so.

But why is it that the medical profession in general finds it hard to accommodate analytic psychiatry in its view of medicine?

Because the doctors think they are closest to God. And they know everything, and they are always against new ideas, which they hadn’t applied themselves. You have to think of Semmelweis; you have to think of Mesmer, of Freud; that is, they are all from the orthodox group. And they understand, you know, they have to know and they have really that life, the responsibility for the life of people it makes them. More reach it, number one. Number two, it’s a field for which you have to be gifted. It isn’t something which you can just learn by rote. You have to have a feeling for people. This is not so good, you know, that’s not scientific.

And I’ll tell you one thing which has always impressed me. People just don’t know what analysis is. They know people who taught it, applied it in their fields, in their daily language and have no idea what it really represents. And they attack it. Even scientists. Scientists really write against it and use it and are not aware of it.

Could you give us an example of . . . we quoted, you pointed out that we quote analytic psychiatry, Freudian psychiatry, in our everyday language. It’s become part of our accepted language.

But it’s always misunderstood!

Give us an example of a misunderstood quote.

For instance, it’s not any more since we are not certified any longer, but you could come to a cocktail party and clearly somebody telling a dream to somebody else and the somebody else said, “Ohhh, you wanted to kill your wife?” No, they didn’t even know that the top thing has nothing to do with what is underneath. You know, at least they understood a little bit, that the dream has a significance. But they didn’t understand how to cut it. Or, transference . . .

Transference, yes.

Or, they’re so nice, they find an analyst. There’s a joke, you know, about the analysts. A couch—-The couch--they have no idea what it is there for.

Yes, the shrink. Couch refers particularly to the analyst.

Cartoons. There’s the couch, there’s the patient, there’s the analyst with a beard, a pad, and a certificate on the wall over the patient. Now, first we don’t all have beards. Second, we don’t put our certificate, and we don’t have a pad. Only when we want to make a special note for something, if we work on something, or young candidate in trainings, writes down because they are afraid when they come to their supervisors they have forgotten. However, the couch is no joke. It’s a relaxing thing which we want to introduce. We don’t want the patient to sit and look at us the way we look at our... and then say what we think is acceptable and what isn’t. This is our whole, most important tool. We call it free association. That the patient relaxes, looks inward, and says what comes out. This is why the analyst sits behind him, so that he doesn’t scan his face; and the analyst can do what is his main obligation, to listen very carefully and not to try to control his expressions.

Now, this listening carefully means he doesn’t do anything. I had a patient who came to me, and when he was on the couch for the first time, he said, “Dr. Bibring, are you one of those analysts where the patient detects after two years that the doctor was dead two years ago already?” So I said, “No. With me, you will find out after one year.” [Laughs.] And then we started a very fruitful analysis.

Do you decide to try to influence your patient? Or do you never . . .

Oh yes. I don’t try to influence, I try to offer a suggestion, what we call an interpretation. At the time when we feel that the pattern has come close together, it makes sense what he said last time and what he said in the first hour and what he said today. And we feel we understand something and the patient can understand with us. We don’t throw it at him just because we think it’s right. If we are good analysts, you understand.

Now, this is something that’s very hard for the profession to get, because we expect when we talk to our children that when we say, “Do it this way, now don’t do it that way,; do it this way,” that that will straighten it out.

That’s right. But look here, there’s such a difference in the overall technique of the medical person and in the overall technique of the psychoanalyst. You know, we keep things in abeyance. As I said, the first thing and the present thing and his symptom all have to stay there until we think we see the pattern. You doctors go whoooff, like that. You know? This doesn’t belong, this doesn’t belong, this doesn’t belong—-you go as to what is useful at this moment. This is this kind what some doctors call their tunnel thinking, and we’re thinking this kind.

How do you yourself see the—-how you became the first woman clinical professor in the medical school. See, well, I just feel that it’s—-nobody can really see how that happens, and yet it’s enormously important in a day when we think we’ve got to struggle for everything. You have not described to me as you were talking about your early days in the outpatient in the Beth Israel and then having seminars or house offices with some students, and then Herman Blumguard, the professor of medicine, hearing about you on his return from India after the war, and then consulting you. You described something that just seemed to be a natural. And yet, you’re a woman.

Look here, it’s very hard to know really, but I can try.

What’s more, a psychiatrist! Who worked, and an analyst to boot.

Look here. I have been asked that many times, and it’s very hard to really come down to what it is. I can give you a few ideas I have. First of all, I think I take my job very seriously. And I don’t like gaps in my knowledge which one could fill. And my husband and I, we had a joking but very realistic statement when we didn’t understand something in our field very well. We decided to get a course on it. Number one, it’s very good, very helpful. Number two, I always did my homework. I don’t slough off things, really. I can’t live with myself when I’m sloppy in that form. Number three, perhaps because I was a foreigner, perhaps because I didn’t fit into anything quite, you mustn’t disregard; perhaps you might, as a woman and as a foreigner, and with everything, what the others are not.

And you didn’t exhibit any undue aggressiveness.

I hope not.

Well, I was thinking, maybe if you had “This I want” and “This I’m up against”—-well, I was conjecturing that perhaps you were . . . Aggressiveness rouses the back of others and sets up barriers, and you just . . .

First of all, I don’t mind little disadvantages, really, I’m not sensitive. Yes, but in very other fields. For disrespect, yes; but for lack of knowledge, no. And I probably was quite flexible, and I just didn’t think of it.

Would you be willing to give a little advice as a result of this experience? For women who feel neglected and unappreciated, and that chauvinist males . . .

I’m very hesitant because I know here, coming from a patriarchic environment in Vienna, I learned here about the way women feel about their position and I do believe that here things have gotten out of hand. Because I remember when I had so many friends in the medical school, in the institute, most of them were men. And something came to my attention, very unpleasantly. We had many guests. They were very interesting people and they were interested people and we had discussions on everything. They came with their wives. And all these women were college graduates, and didn’t open their mouth. And I was the only woman, and I was embarrassed because I was the hostess. At least there was something in that family pattern which obviously never came to my attention in my own home.

In Vienna, I was taken for granted, like another student, and I never thought of it. I was a maverick, probably. Because when I went to medical school, there were perhaps five women in medical school. I found it delightful that there were so many men.

Because what happened when the movement started, the liberation movement, I had a number of urgent calls and the people who wanted to talk to me were women, young women in the liberation movement, and they came always armed with Freud’s writing on women. Now, they ask me, “How could you work with such a man?” I never thought of it! I mean, he appreciated us, he made no distinction, but he had a certain theory about women that they have a weaker conscience (meaning Super Ego) on the basis of their special anatomical difference, etc. I don’t want to go into all that. I just tell you that he saw women of the turn of the century. Deeply repressed, deeply frustrated, playful, nothing to do. Even my patients were already completely different. And he collaged a theory about what he thought he saw. He always used clinical observations to form a theory. He gave it up when he found that he was wrong. And later on, with the new lectures, etc., he said, “Probably I don’t understand women.” Or the specific. And it might need women analysts to help us out. Now, I don’t think it needs women analysts if that were the case. I wouldn’t understand men patients either. No, I think here to put two things now together. I don’t know, do you talk about theory about women? Or do you talk now about Madam Mark, and I don’t think it has to be a woman to understand the woman. Because I could communicate with any man what I think, a specific female, or that women can tell it to you, and if you are a person who can listen, you will understand it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t understand you, either. Because you are a man, you have different needs, I’m fully aware of the difference we need.

What I’m puzzled over, is how the tradition, the thinking of man and woman, are different. How that has come into being and how one, if it’s wrong, how can one go about dispelling it? It’s giving us trouble now.

Ah, you touch on something very complicated. I tell you why. There are differences in the emotional reaction but if I get into that now, I can just highlight it. I do believe women usually are closer to childhood, to emotions because their whole biological function somehow directs them that way and certain things in a woman might be very influenced by these little yet-unproduced caretaking.

Present-day society hasn’t placed man quite in that same position. He doesn’t have to give up for the bearing of children. But clearly, our obligations and our senses of responsibility are touched differently. Our sense of responsibility, let’s say, toward marriage—-man and woman has a different concept of it, must have a little.

Can I tell you what one of my students said? Somebody asked in my seminar, “Why do men really marry?” So, one of the students said, “Because they want a housekeeper who stays put.” Ha ha. Well?

Well, yes, we’re very selfish. And many of them want somebody to make their economy stable and secure because it’s a way of avoiding anxiety. And now currently we’re so worried about this sort of thing, and homosexual tendencies and friendships that seem to go a little bit beyond what are considered reasonable-—friendships among boys that go on overly long, parents get worried or friends get worried that there’s a latent homosexual tendency among them. And the same thing is true with girls. But this is, basically, this is friendship.

You make a difference between friendship and sexuality, as if it were really things of a completely different breed. This is the great misunderstanding of Freud that when he talks about the biological foundation and the drives, and the sex drive is one of the most important things, shaping our adjustment, he talks not just about pure sex and intercourse, he talks about all the derivatives of this love. But it’s one nature. This all he compromises in his concept of love and sex. So you can’t say it isn’t sex, it is sublimated and it is a redirected type but there is something underneath this need for another closeness for people. We just call it all part of the primitive, lowdown sexual drive, and this is what people misunderstand.

Is the word ‘friendship’ interdependent be an adequate alternative?

But you know, it’s a derivative of this very primitive deep down drive. What’s wrong with it?

Well, the only thing wrong is that the word ‘sex’ either makes people recoil, or they are excessively interested and wonder what’s coming next.

Sure, sure. So you understand, this is what I say, they knew about psychoanalytic concept but they don’t understand them really. All of them seem to talk about nothing but sex. I can assure you that there can be half a year without ever touching on it, on its direct, simple form., We talk about attachment, we talk about all kinds of things. Homosexuality, for instance. It is Freud who says, like a good anatomist, that we are bisexual.

`Yes, very clear. And perhaps it’s the most telling argument that in essence we’re both, but we’re predominately one or the other. And hard, very hard for a lot of people to deal with. And medical.

More than that. You know, now they try to say homosexuality is normal, which is the other extreme.

It’s very hard for men. It’s hard for grown men, established men to recognize a really deep affection for another man. Am I right on that? And yet it’s a very natural thing. Is that also true in women?

I don’t think so. I don’t think quite so. You know, the beauty of all this psychoanalysis is that there is nothing that can be said for everybody. Everything is different and we are used to try to find out where the difference is. However, a little bit in general I can say, you know, a boy grows up with an attachment to his mother. And shifts, transfers it to the girls and to the women. When this attachment is disturbed to such a point that he has to avoid women, that is a much more deep-rooted problem for him, because it breaks, so to speak, his—-let us call it—-‘normal’ development.

A boy’s homosexual tendency then doesn’t derive from an unusually strong love of the father.

That is what I mean. It can be an unusually strong love, it can be an unusually strong fear of the father and a submissiveness to father. It can come from an unusually strong conflict with mother, so that one turns to father for compensation. It has then enough possibilities.

Yes, you’ve just given an excellent example of the multiple factors involved in anything. As a matter of fact, all could operate in the same time in a kind of confusion, and it may be very difficult for you as an analyst to identify in a patient.

See why you have to wait and to listen? But you know, there is now in the population a trend away from psychoanalysis. It’s an anti-intellectual trend and analysis before was mysterious, because of symbols and dreams. Now it’s too intellectual, and the younger generation goes towards mysterious experiences, gurus, astrologers, the primal scream, the touch, sensitivity group, with the hope to cleanse themselves by an emotional discharge.