KENNETH FEINER
MARTIN BERGMANN
MARTIN BERGMANN: The Last 21 Years Kenneth Feiner Martin Bergmann has contributed to our understanding of psychoanalysis for more than sixty years. A review of his con‑ tributions to psychoanalysis was completed in 1994, when Bergmann was 83 years old. Consideration of his remark‑ able productivity in the last twenty years clearly demonstrates the need to update this review. In these years, he extended his writing on the history of psychoanalysis, added to his contribu‑ tions to an understanding of love, advanced ideas about psy‑ choanalytic technique, and wrote two books on Shakespeare, as well as doing work in anthropology, sociology, literature, history, and religious studies. This paper reviews that work.
In the fall of 2009, when I informed Professor Martin Bergmann that the steering committee for the American Psychological Association Division 39 conference planned to include a panel in his honor, he first asked me when this panel was supposed to take place. After he was told that it would take place in a year and a half, he quipped, “You are very optimistic.” Ninety-six years old at the time, Bergmann died four years later, weeks before his 101st birthday. In 1994 a festschrift was published honoring Bergmann’s contributions to psychoanalysis, including a series of papers inspired by his work. In the introduction to The Spectrum of Psychoanalysis, Arlene Kramer Richards reviewed his work, beginning with his early days as a psychologist and ending in 1993, with his contributions as a psychoanalyst. As Bergmann was 81 at the time the book was first in print, Richards might reasonably have assumed that the volume represented a précis of his life’s work. However, his remarkable productivity in the last twenty years clearly dem-
This paper is an expanded version of a paper presented at a panel honoring Professor Martin Bergmann at the American Psychological Association Division 39 meeting in 2011.
Psychoanalytic Review, 102(3), June 2015
© 2015 N.P.A.P.
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onstrates the need to extend that review. This survey of Bergmann’s work begins in 1994, where Richards left off. Since 1994 Bergmann has edited two books (2000a, 2004b), expanding on articles that he wrote relating to the history of psychoanalysis; coauthored a book on Shakespeare’s sonnets (Bergmann & Bergmann, 2009); authored a second book, on Shakespeare’s unconscious (2013b); wrote eight book reviews (1993a, 1994b, 1996, 1997a, 1999, 2000b, 2004a, 2005) and twenty papers; and had two letters published; furthermore, he made numerous presentations that are either not published or have not been published yet. In addition to his significant contributions to the psychoanalytic corpus, Bergmann’s papers span other scholarly fields, including anthropology, sociology, literature, history, and religious studies. Perhaps more than any other psychoanalyst, Bergmann investigated the history of psychoanalysis. In his book Understanding Dissidence and Controversy in the History of Psychoanalysis (2004b), he provided an account of psychoanalytic dissent, examining the lives, careers, and ideas of the dissenters and their reception by the psychoanalytic world. In this work, Bergmann also sought to understand the origins of conformity and orthodoxy in psychoanalysis. He consistently advocated for openness to the new ideas that dissidents brought to psychoanalysis, believing that understanding history clarifies theoretical differences and advances tolerance between different psychoanalytic schools. He warned that “dissidents can be . . . summarily dismissed only if psychoanalysis wants to continue to remain a narrow sectarian group and blind itself to the richness implicit in its own history” (Bergmann, 2004b, p. 3). Bergmann observed that Anna Freud was following her father’s model when she attempted to get the Kleinians expelled from the British Psychoanalytic Society, and also in her disparagement of the idea that psychoanalytic teaching should be an open forum in which the views of dissidents and heretics are included. Opposing her view, Bergmann (2011) suggested “familiarity with old controversies and why they emerged contributes significantly to the maturity of the student of psychoanalysis” (p. 669). He believed that understanding the history of psychoanalysis, including past controversies and why they emerged, serves as an antidote to orthodoxy based on censorship and withholding information.
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The construal of dissidence as resistance to uncomfortable ideas, he believed, had a lamentable impact on the history of psychoanalysis. Bergmann (2004b) commented, “The emphasis on resistance to Freud’s discovered truth was not productive and contributed to the creation of an orthodoxy that is not in the best interest of psychoanalysis” (p. 254). Resistance to Freud’s ideas played a role, but was an insufficient explanation of a more complex process. The expulsion of dissidents, beginning with Adler, ushered in an “irrational . . . loyalty” to Freud (p. 12). The faithful could then claim that they dared to face difficult truths while others faltered. While this inclination may have enhanced a sense of cohesion among Freud’s disciples, it also led to conformity and orthodoxy among them and to the adoption of a contemptuous attitude toward anyone who strayed from the party line. In his paper “The Dual Impact of Freud’s Death and Freud’s Death Instinct Theory on the History of Psychoanalysis,” Bergmann (2011) continued to examine the impact of the early history of psychoanalysis on the course of psychoanalysis after Freud’s death. He argued that the way Freud constructed the foundation of psychoanalysis prevented its development into a unified movement after his death. Significant responsibility for this lies in the fact that Freud—having never designated a successor owing to his disappointment in Jung—left psychoanalysis without clear guidelines indicating how he envisioned its growth and development. In the absence of this, “psychoanalysis faced a choice between two alternatives: to remain frozen at the point where Freud left it and become an orthodoxy, or to make progress at the cost of breaking up into schools in conflict with each other. As it happened, both approaches were tried at the same time” (p. 666). So, along with psychoanalysis itself, its founder has bequeathed its divisions upon psychoanalysis. While Bergmann was receptive to new ideas, he was not in favor of an uncritical eclecticism. With regard to the first controversy in the history of psychoanalysis, Bergmann observed that Adler and Freud were dealing with two schools of therapy grounded in different basic assumptions of human nature and distinct techniques of therapy. As was the case with Freud and Adler’s disagreements and continues to be the case in current controversies, the psychoanalytic process does not provide a suitable forum to adjudicate these differences. Distinguishing between disagreements
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in psychoanalysis and in the natural sciences, Bergmann argued that the latter could often be resolved through further experimentation, while the former are more like religious or philosophical controversies, which cannot be reconciled by rational means. Dogmatism, Bergmann argued, arises at those points where psychoanalysis cannot provide an answer. In the absence of a means of contesting differences of opinion, Bergmann (2004b) adopted a pragmatic perspective, arguing that different ways of understanding clinical phenomena offered by different therapists increase clinical sensitivity by expanding the repertoire of ways of organizing and interpreting clinical data. At the same time, the recognition that clinical material can be interpreted in different ways raised “a question of the role of truth in the treatment process” (Bergmann, 2004b, p. 13). The second volume of a series of books developed by Bergmann (2000a) under the auspices of the Psychoanalytic Research and Development Fund, titled ,The Hartmann Era, dealt with the period when Hartmann was viewed, at least within American psychoanalysis, as the undisputed leader of psychoanalysis. Viewing Hartmann as a “modifier,”1 Bergmann traced the revisions that Hartmann made in psychoanalytic thinking. He argued that Hartmann’s influence has waned, particularly with regard to the concepts of the conflict-free sphere, neutralization, secondary autonomy, and change of function. Brenner’s (1982) idea that better compromise formations replaced neurotic compromise formations implies that core conflicts are not fully resolvable. With this modification of Hartmann, Brenner restored the notion that conflict is ubiquitous, and supplanted the idea of the conflict-free sphere. Bergmann (2000a) maintained, It seems to me that the Hartmann era did not survive the deaths of its creators for the following reason: it did not live up to its promise to create a psychology beyond the realm of conflict. As a result, it had less to offer to the social sciences than it believed. . . . Also, as the turbulent sixties began, when the crisis of identity deepened and cultural narcissism increasingly became the norm, Kernberg, Kohut, Erikson, and Loewald were more in tune with the new generation than the Hartmannites. (p. 63)
Appraising Hartmann’s legacy, Bergmann noted that the passing of an era left behind a series of new problems not previously an-
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ticipated. Psychoanalytic controversies such as the following originated in the Hartmann era: (1) whether infant observations and research contribute to psychoanalysis, (2) whether men and women develop from symbiosis to independence or sustain a lifelong need for a self-object, and (3) the issue of developmental arrest versus intrapsychic conflict. These debates also revealed the extent to which psychoanalysis had been infiltrated by philosophical ideas. Bergmann pointed out that, once again, one’s allegiance in these controversies does not emerge from observations made in the consulting room, but, rather, is based on an analyst’s Weltanschauung or perhaps his or her unconscious needs. Turning his attention to the shift from the topographic to the structural model, Bergmann (2011) observed that structural theory had a traumatic impact on psychoanalysts because it called into question the curative potential of psychoanalysis. He asserted that with the shift to the structural model, psychoanalytic work became more difficult; the task of the psychoanalyst became more challenging and the benefits of psychoanalysis more unclear. According to the earlier model, the task of the analyst was merely to overcome repression and facilitate the emergence of the patient’s unconscious wishes, which were thought to be pushing upward, via dreams and slips of the tongue, into consciousness. With the structural model, the possibility of eradicating internal conflict was no longer considered to be possible; rather, one could only achieve a different balance between the conflicting interests. “Furthermore,” Bergmann (2011), stated, “under the structural point of view, the impact of the death instinct was much harder to combat and the repetition compulsion was a more tenacious adversary” (p. 672). Considering crossroads in theorizing to be a fruitful line of inquiry, Bergmann sought to understand the profound change in Freud’s thinking that took place between Studies on Hysteria (1895) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). This revision in Freud’s ideas led to several of his most significant discoveries, including the findings that dreams have meaning, which can be discerned through the technique of free association, and that all people possess unconscious thoughts and wishes that shape their lives while remaining unknown to them. With this, the demarcation between normal and neurotic became far less clearly defined. This shift also moved psychoanalysis from being primarily focused on the
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process of cure to a broader concern with the understanding of culture and human nature. Bergmann documented the role of Freud’s self-analysis, particularly his discovery of the Oedipus complex, in this transformation of his thinking. Bergmann’s contributions to a psychoanalytic understanding of the nature of love are well known. In several recent papers that dealt with love both in real life and in the analytic context, he continued to make use of Freud’s idea that all finding (of love) is a “re-finding.” To this, he added his own essential contribution that people seek out love objects who will heal the wounds inflicted by early objects, hoping to find in them what they did not get from their parents. He then used this idea in understanding the impediments to finding an object and to falling in love. In one paper, “On Love and Its Enemies” (Bergmann, 1995), he made two observations that added to his earlier contributions about an understanding of love. First, he noted that the adult love object is often unable to heal the wounds of childhood that a person seeks in relationships. When this happens, the person may feel betrayed by and come to hate the object who awakens a promise without fulfilling it. Bergmann’s second idea, relating to factors that interfere with the capacity to love, has to do with situations where children have more than one primary object. In these cases, “each love object will seek its own re-finding” (p. 9). Individuals with this background may have difficulty focusing their love on one object and may need more than one object at a time or different ones serially. A paper titled “The Woman I Love and the Woman I Cannot Live Without” (2013c) built on his earlier formulation that the longing for merger, a residue of the symbiotic phase of development, is re-evoked when one falls in love. His reformulation emphasized the importance of the capacity to experience and tolerate separateness in understanding love relationships. This capacity allows one to bear the loss of boundaries that accompanies the revival of symbiotic wishes, to experience the otherness of the love object, and to tolerate missing someone—all prerequisites for the capacity to love. Thus, a happy love entails a balancing of both the need to merge and the need to maintain a sense of a separate identity. Equilibrium can be threatened both, by too much symbiosis or too much separateness.
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In “The Challenge of Erotized Transference to Psychoanalytic Technique,” Bergmann (1994a) extended his studies of love to an understanding of the erotized transference. He eschewed the distinction between real and transference love, noting that one finds the tendency to re-find people who are similar in character to early objects in order to heal past wounds inflicted by those early objects. Bergmann rejected Freud’s grim view of the possibility of treating patients suffering from erotized transference who accept nothing less than, in Freud’s words, “soup and dumplings,” arguing that Freud’s pessimism derived from a loss of a neutral and empathic psychoanalytic stance. Reflecting his unyielding belief in the psychoanalytic process, Bergmann believed that when an analyst maintains a tolerant attitude and attends to the minutiae of the patient’s associations, the patient will eventually reveal new motifs and possibilities that convey what is behind the erotized transference. Interestingly, Bergmann, unexpectedly attentive to the interactive dimension of psychoanalysis, advised analysts “to consider what they did or did not do to instigate this love or to bring it into the service of the analysis, as a corrective to the fact that the literature on erotized transferences is written … in the language of a one-person psychology” (p. 514). In “Passions in the Therapeutic Relationship: A Historical Perspective” (1997b), a paper that is pertinent to discussions of sexual boundary crossing, Bergmann used the relationships between Jung and Ferenczi and their respective analysands, Sabina Spielrein and Elma Palos, to investigate the analyst’s experience of love, highlighting conditions which make analysts vulnerable to falling in love with their patients. His recognition of the power of those conditions is evident in his plea that analysts should be cautious in their judgments towards those who fail in the task of channeling the patient’s love into the service of the task of analyzing and understanding. He wrote, “Freud’s idea to tame love and make it serviceable for therapy was original and bold. We must keep in mind, however, that it is not the natural aim of love and if in a number of cases it miscarries, we should, not in my opinion, judge too harshly those who have failed in this effort” (p. 92). Bergmann’s recognition of the challenge of working as an analyst, along with his capacity for empathy and his nonjudgmental stance are evident in this remark.
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Throughout his career, Bergmann has made significant creative contributions to applied psychoanalysis. He studied two figures that he claimed as ancestors of psychoanalysis, Rembrandt and Shakespeare. Bergmann recalled one of his teachers, Paul Federn, quoting Freud: “when you think of me, think of Rembrandt, a little light and a great deal of darkness” (Bergmann, 2006, p. 977). Both Shakespeare and Rembrandt, Bergmann noted, have enhanced society’s capacity to turn one’s gaze inward. Bergmann wrote extensively about Shakespeare’s work. In “The Inability to Mourn and the Inability to Love in Shakespeare’s Hamlet” (2009a), he argued that Hamlet is a creative projection of Shakespeare’s inability to mourn. Writing the play served as self-therapy in a moment of inner turmoil following the death of Shakespeare’s only son (p. 399). The book What Silent Love Hath Writ: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Bergmann & Bergmann, 2009), coauthored by Bergmann’s son, Michael Bergmann, began with an assumption that the “I” of the sonnets is a single character— either Shakespeare or a character of his creation. This strategy, they argued, allowed them to make connections between disparate contents and arrive at a coherent picture, just as one might interpret a patient’s associations. This perspective enabled the authors to decode the major themes in the sonnets and illuminated the thought processes of the character that they referred to as the Poet of the Sonnets. The Bergmanns pointed out that the sonnets “are not traditional hymns to love, but expressions of inner conflict. Three types of love compete with each other: homosexual love for a young man, heterosexual attraction for a dark lady and self-love” (p. 9). In the first chapter, the Bergmanns used four sonnets to introduce the major themes that they believed were evident throughout these verses, including the Poet’s anxiety about his mortality and his view of time as an adversary, the Poet’s struggle to surmount his self-love in order to love others, and the Poet’s love of nature and the way this love revealed his affection for the Young Man and the Dark Lady of the sonnets. Bergmann’s (2013b) second book on Shakespeare, The Unconscious in Shakespeare’s Plays, was written with the idea that, for many readers, an understanding of what was unconscious in Shakespeare’s plays and of what one might discern of Shakespeare’s unconscious deepens the pleasure of reading Shakespeare and
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enriches the reader’s understanding. Cross-referencing themes emerging in different plays provides clues to unconscious connections that are not revealed by an individual play. This then sheds light on the intrapsychic issues that may have been disturbing Shakespeare at the time he wrote different plays and offers insight into how his plays represent his attempts to resolve these issues. Bergmann revisited the Oedipus complex in two recent papers. In one, Bergmann (2013a) argued that two significant childhood events—the Oedipus complex and sibling rivalry—with their many variations are inseparable and interwoven, influencing each other and leaving their imprint on adult sexuality. In the cases presented in this paper, Bergmann showed how the birth and presence of siblings led his patients to turn to the other parent to re-find the blissful union that was lost and to replace the object who perpetrated the disappointment. In the second paper, “The Oedipus Complex and Psychoanalytic Technique” (2010), he reminded his readers that when the idea of the Oedipus complex occurred to Freud, it was accompanied by a fleeting sense that the phenomena of being in love with one’s mother and jealous of the father that accounted for the power of Oedipus Rex might also explain Hamlet’s irresolution. Freud’s achievement, Bergmann maintained, was the connection he made between personal experience and the dramas of Oedipus and Hamlet, which led to his discerning universal phenomena of childhood. In this paper, Bergmann considers the technical implications of his observation relating to how derivatives of the Oedipus complex appear in clinical settings. Observing that both sides of the Oedipus complex, the murderous and the incestuous, are rarely portrayed jointly in literature and tend not to appear at once in the consulting room, Bergmann concludes, “the full Oedipus is not experienced and has to be reconstructed by the therapist” (p. 537). This observation is refined through Bergmann’s differentiation of construction and interpretation. Interpretations are evoked in the analyst by something the patient says. Surprising the analyst when they arise, interpretations occur in response to an analysand’s associations and memories, and are accompanied by a “strong emotional experience”,and with “recognition of why the analysand cannot attain the insight without assistance” (Bergmann, 2010, p. 538). It is possible to convey the interpretation to a
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patient as soon as he or she pauses, without consideration of tact and timing. Constructions, however, do not emerge with an “Aha” moment of discovery; rather, they are based on the application of a more general psychoanalytic understanding. Recognition of the current application to the patient confers a sense of affective significance and immediacy to them. Also, in contrast with interpretation, timing is crucial for reconstruction as it will not be convincing to patients if offered too early, but when it is neglected patients tend to go in circles, unable to overcome their inhibitions on their own. It is better to wait to offer a reconstruction until one has accumulated many derivatives. Bergmann points out that “every patient has his or her variant of the Oedipus complex and it is the detection of this unique variant that gives the Oedipus complex its curative power . . . . we should preserve this uniqueness and therefore introduce the construction of the Oedipus complex in a later phase of the analysis, rather than as soon as the first derivatives appear” (p. 539). Bergmann frequently refers to the requirement that the analyst balance the patient’s limitations in getting past inhibitions on his or her own and the value of waiting to tell the patient something until it is likely to be emotionally meaningful. While he noted the risk that premature communication can be detrimental when a patient uses it to strengthen his or her resistances to treatment or when it leads to an overly intellectual understanding, he placed somewhat more emphasis on the problems that result from excessive delay in interpreting, repeatedly calling attention to the deleterious effects of the analyst’s passivity (Bergmann, 1993b, 2003). His concern stems from several related observations: First, patients come to treatment because of conflicts they cannot master on their own; second, they are usually unable to attain the depth of insight needed to relieve their conflicts through self-analysis; and third, most of the people who consult a psychoanalyst are quite limited in what they can tell him or her about themselves. They will eventually begin to go in circles, repeating what has already been said. In Bergmann’s view, the analyst must take an active role in breaking through the repetitive cycle that arises when analysts leave their patients to struggle on their own or to figure things out on their own. The analyst’s main task, he said, is to safeguard the analytic process and “at times, set it in motion” (1993c, p. 381).
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For the most part, this is accomplished through interpretation. In a paper written for a panel on supervision that was part of a symposium on training and education, Bergmann (2003) concisely summarizes his therapeutic philosophy in a fifteen-point guide that would serve well as an outline for a course on psychoanalytic technique. In this brief guide, he referred to the therapist’s active role in several places, commenting that “the initial inquiry period should be an active one during which the therapist develops the therapeutic strategy” (p. 331). At another point, he warned that if the therapist just listens without intervening and finding “a way to break through the manifest circle and lead the patient to an unexpected and deeper understanding of himself or herself” (p. 329), the treatment is likely to become stalemated, as a result of reaching “an equilibrium of forces” (p. 329). Bergmann considered the analyst to be more responsible for the advancement of the treatment than the patient. The skills and talents that an analyst must possess to be able to mobilize an analysis include “sensitivity to the inner experience of the patient, . . . familiarity with the language of the unconscious” (p. 331), “a capacity to awaken curiosity in the patient to his or her own psychological processes . . . and a capacity to interpret the forces in a patient that oppose the success of the treatment” (p. 332). Notably, this responsibility of the analyst extends to termination as well, where Bergmann considers the analyst to play a significant role in whether the analysis ends in a stalemate or reaches a satisfactory conclusion. Not surprisingly, in 2005 Bergmann was asked to write a chapter on termination, titled “Termination and Reanalysis,” for a textbook on psychoanalysis (now in its second edition; Bergmann, 2012). In this chapter he builds on two earlier papers he wrote on the subject. He observed that he had been prevented from thinking through the issue fully in the earlier papers “out of a sense of guilt toward Freud for understanding the history of psychoanalysis in a way he could not” (p. 241), claiming, drolly, that he was able to take this step now that he is past his ninetieth birthday. Bergmann distinguished between a group of patients who are better able to arrive at a reasonably satisfactory termination and others who seem to require continuing and often lifelong support to keep functioning. Discussing the technical implications of this distinction, Bergmann noted that every psychoanalytic cure
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involves two factors: The first consists of insights gained through the experience of recovering repressed contents, which lead to revisions of one’s picture of oneself and the major love objects in one’s life, and the second consists of a “corrective emotional experience,” which comes about when the therapist responds in ways that differ from the patient’s expectations and from the ways early parental figures behaved. He then hypothesized that in the treatment of more disturbed patients, the corrective emotional experience will be more important, hence termination of the treatment will be more difficult for these patients. Bergmann explains, To the extent that the analyst is a transference figure either as a result of displacement from parental figures or as a projection of unacceptable aspects of the self, the end of the analysis can be reached. But to the extent that the psychoanalyst is a new object . . . and the therapist becomes a primary object like the parent termination becomes uncertain. . . . Only a transference relationship has a termination point; a primary relationship cannot be terminated. (p. 246)
I believe one can safely argue that there is no psychoanalyst better equipped than Bergmann to address the topic of one of his most recent papers, “Psychoanalysis in Old Age: The Patient and the Analyst” (2014). He first dispensed with Freud’s skepticism about the analysis of older people. Freud (1898) believed that these analyses would only lead to regrets without the possibility of using the insight gained for new and more productive endeavors. The analysis, according to Freud, would not “pay for itself” and would only lead to regret and self-recrimination. Bergmann abjured Freud’s view, considering it to be “too commercial,” noting that it is “as if psychoanalysis has to be financially profitable to be worth the effort and expense” (pp. 2-3). For Bergmann, borrowing a slogan from the shipping industry, “Getting there is half the fun.” Moreover, he argued, it is the analyst’s job to ensure that our understanding is communicated to patients in a manner that the ego can use, and not subject to the requirements of the superego and the id. Bergmann pointed out that the disappearance of the future, one of the central characteristics of old age, tends to highlight the past, resulting in a “compulsory re-examination” (2014, p. 4) of the past. One of the main tasks of the analyst in this pro-
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cess is to ensure this process does not fall under the domination of the superego and result in depression. Bergmann enumerated the problems that elderly patients bring to treatment, suggesting that the most prevalent concern lies in their relationship to their adult children, followed next by problems in the sphere of love. In this, the elderly patient is hardly distinguishable from our younger patients. Similarly, another category that Bergmann considers is the “existential patient,” whose chief complaint is that he or she has not lived his or her life fully and does not wish to die before attaining a fuller life. The realization that death and life are inseparable was an important insight in Bergmann’s personal philosophy of life and death. He noted the irony in the fact that humans are the only species that can recognize the inevitability of death, yet they do so much to deny this knowledge. Basing his view on his clinical experience, he suggested that the presence of good internal objects enables one to accept death, adding that it is helpful in this regard to have been wanted by one’s parents. Informing our understanding of why Bergmann (2010) avoided retiring are his comments that analysts can never retire because it takes us so long to become any good at analyzing, and (as he told a class of graduates at the NYU Postdoctoral Institute several years ago) that his life “has been an enormous journey, an interesting life,” and, most importantly, one that enabled him to “avoid retiring in Florida and spending a boring life.” Note 1. In his early work on the history of psychoanalytic technique, Bergmann (1976, with F. Hartmann) divided analytic theorists after Freud into “extenders” and “modifiers.”
REFERENCES Bergmann, M. S., ed., with Hartmann, F. (1976). The evolution of psychoanalytic technique. New York: Basic Books. _______ (1993a). [Review of the book Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling: A psychoanalytic study, by Jerome Oremland]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 41:886892. _______ (1993b). Psychoanalytic education and the social reality of psychoanalysis. Psychoanal. Rev., 80:199-210.
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_______ (1993c). Reality and psychic reality in Ernst Kris’s last papers: An attempt to update his findings. Psychoanal. Inq., 13:372–383. _______ (1994a). The challenge of erotized transference to psychoanalytic technique. Psychoanal. Inq., 14:499-518. _______ (1994b). [Review of the book Freud’s Moses-Studie Als Tagtraum, by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 42:898-901. _______ (1995). On love and its enemies. Psychoanal. Rev., 82:1-19. _______ (1996). [Review of the book Psychology of a saint: Ignatius of Loyola, by W. W. Meissner]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 44:611-618. _______ (1997a). [Review of the book The languages of psychoanalysis, by John Gedo]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 78:173-175. _______ (1997b). Passions in the therapeutic relationship. Psychoanal. Inq., 5:73-94. _______ (1999). [Review of the book Moses and civilization: The meaning behind Freud’s myth, by Robert Paul]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 47:14111414. _______ (2000a). The Hartmann era. New York: Other Press. _______ (2000b). [Review of the book Lay analysis: Life inside the controversy, by Robert S. Wallerstein]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 69:162-167. _______ (2003). A contribution to the supervisory panel. Psychoanal. Dial., 13:327-339. _______ (2004a). [Review of the book Psychoanalysis and the humanities: The preference for the primitive episodes in the history of Western taste and art, by E. H. Gombrich]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 52:301-306. _______ (2004b). Understanding dissidence and controversy in the history of psychoanalysis. New York: Other Press. _______ (2005). [Review of the book The psychoanalytic wars of yesterday: Otto Fenichel 119 rundbriefe (one hundred nineteen circular letters) (19341945). Two volumes, by Johannes Reichmayr and Else Muhlleitner]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 53:663-672. _______ (2006). A psychoanalytic study of Rembrandt’s self-portraits. Psychoanal. Rev., 93:977-990. _______ (2009a). The inability to mourn and the inability to love in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Psychoanal. Inq., 78:397-423. _______ (2009b). The 1993 symposium on psychoanalytic education. Psychoanal. Rev., 96:405-409. _______ (2010). The Oedipus complex and psychoanalytic technique. Psychoanal. Inq., 30:535-540. _______ (2010, June). Graduation address, New York University Postdoctoral Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. _______ (2011). The dual impact of Freud’s death and Freud’s death instinct theory on the history of psychoanalysis. Psychoanal. Rev., 98:685696. _______ (2012). Termination and reanalysis. In. G. O. Gabbard, E. E. Litowitz, & P. Williams, eds., Textbook of psychoanalysis (2nd ed., pp. 303-318). Arlington, Va.: American Psychiatric Publishing. _______ (2013a). Credo. Psychoanal. Dial., 23:261-268. _______ (2013b). The unconscious in Shakespeare’s plays. London: Karnac. _______ (2013c). The woman I love and the woman I cannot live without. Psychoanal. Rev., 100:769-774.
MARTIN BERGMANN 421 _______ (2014). Psychoanalysis in old age: The patient and the analyst. In S, Kuchuck, ed., Clinical implications of the psychoanalyst’s life experience: When the personal becomes professional (pp. 237-246). London: Routledge. _______ & Bergmann, M. (2009). What silent love hath writ: A psychoanalytic exploration of Shakespeare’s sonnets. New York: Gotschna Ventures. Brenner, C. (1982). The mind in conflict. New York: International Universities Press. Freud, S. (1898). Sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses. In J. Strachey, ed. and trans., The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974. 3:259-285. Richards, A. K., & Richards, A. D., eds. (1994). The spectrum of psychoanalysis: Essays in honor of Martin Bergmann. Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press.
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The Psychoanalytic Review Vol. 102, No. 3, June 2015
MARTIN BERGMANN
MARTIN BERGMANN: The Last 21 Years Kenneth Feiner Martin Bergmann has contributed to our understanding of psychoanalysis for more than sixty years. A review of his con‑ tributions to psychoanalysis was completed in 1994, when Bergmann was 83 years old. Consideration of his remark‑ able productivity in the last twenty years clearly demonstrates the need to update this review. In these years, he extended his writing on the history of psychoanalysis, added to his contribu‑ tions to an understanding of love, advanced ideas about psy‑ choanalytic technique, and wrote two books on Shakespeare, as well as doing work in anthropology, sociology, literature, history, and religious studies. This paper reviews that work.
In the fall of 2009, when I informed Professor Martin Bergmann that the steering committee for the American Psychological Association Division 39 conference planned to include a panel in his honor, he first asked me when this panel was supposed to take place. After he was told that it would take place in a year and a half, he quipped, “You are very optimistic.” Ninety-six years old at the time, Bergmann died four years later, weeks before his 101st birthday. In 1994 a festschrift was published honoring Bergmann’s contributions to psychoanalysis, including a series of papers inspired by his work. In the introduction to The Spectrum of Psychoanalysis, Arlene Kramer Richards reviewed his work, beginning with his early days as a psychologist and ending in 1993, with his contributions as a psychoanalyst. As Bergmann was 81 at the time the book was first in print, Richards might reasonably have assumed that the volume represented a précis of his life’s work. However, his remarkable productivity in the last twenty years clearly dem-
This paper is an expanded version of a paper presented at a panel honoring Professor Martin Bergmann at the American Psychological Association Division 39 meeting in 2011.
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onstrates the need to extend that review. This survey of Bergmann’s work begins in 1994, where Richards left off. Since 1994 Bergmann has edited two books (2000a, 2004b), expanding on articles that he wrote relating to the history of psychoanalysis; coauthored a book on Shakespeare’s sonnets (Bergmann & Bergmann, 2009); authored a second book, on Shakespeare’s unconscious (2013b); wrote eight book reviews (1993a, 1994b, 1996, 1997a, 1999, 2000b, 2004a, 2005) and twenty papers; and had two letters published; furthermore, he made numerous presentations that are either not published or have not been published yet. In addition to his significant contributions to the psychoanalytic corpus, Bergmann’s papers span other scholarly fields, including anthropology, sociology, literature, history, and religious studies. Perhaps more than any other psychoanalyst, Bergmann investigated the history of psychoanalysis. In his book Understanding Dissidence and Controversy in the History of Psychoanalysis (2004b), he provided an account of psychoanalytic dissent, examining the lives, careers, and ideas of the dissenters and their reception by the psychoanalytic world. In this work, Bergmann also sought to understand the origins of conformity and orthodoxy in psychoanalysis. He consistently advocated for openness to the new ideas that dissidents brought to psychoanalysis, believing that understanding history clarifies theoretical differences and advances tolerance between different psychoanalytic schools. He warned that “dissidents can be . . . summarily dismissed only if psychoanalysis wants to continue to remain a narrow sectarian group and blind itself to the richness implicit in its own history” (Bergmann, 2004b, p. 3). Bergmann observed that Anna Freud was following her father’s model when she attempted to get the Kleinians expelled from the British Psychoanalytic Society, and also in her disparagement of the idea that psychoanalytic teaching should be an open forum in which the views of dissidents and heretics are included. Opposing her view, Bergmann (2011) suggested “familiarity with old controversies and why they emerged contributes significantly to the maturity of the student of psychoanalysis” (p. 669). He believed that understanding the history of psychoanalysis, including past controversies and why they emerged, serves as an antidote to orthodoxy based on censorship and withholding information.
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The construal of dissidence as resistance to uncomfortable ideas, he believed, had a lamentable impact on the history of psychoanalysis. Bergmann (2004b) commented, “The emphasis on resistance to Freud’s discovered truth was not productive and contributed to the creation of an orthodoxy that is not in the best interest of psychoanalysis” (p. 254). Resistance to Freud’s ideas played a role, but was an insufficient explanation of a more complex process. The expulsion of dissidents, beginning with Adler, ushered in an “irrational . . . loyalty” to Freud (p. 12). The faithful could then claim that they dared to face difficult truths while others faltered. While this inclination may have enhanced a sense of cohesion among Freud’s disciples, it also led to conformity and orthodoxy among them and to the adoption of a contemptuous attitude toward anyone who strayed from the party line. In his paper “The Dual Impact of Freud’s Death and Freud’s Death Instinct Theory on the History of Psychoanalysis,” Bergmann (2011) continued to examine the impact of the early history of psychoanalysis on the course of psychoanalysis after Freud’s death. He argued that the way Freud constructed the foundation of psychoanalysis prevented its development into a unified movement after his death. Significant responsibility for this lies in the fact that Freud—having never designated a successor owing to his disappointment in Jung—left psychoanalysis without clear guidelines indicating how he envisioned its growth and development. In the absence of this, “psychoanalysis faced a choice between two alternatives: to remain frozen at the point where Freud left it and become an orthodoxy, or to make progress at the cost of breaking up into schools in conflict with each other. As it happened, both approaches were tried at the same time” (p. 666). So, along with psychoanalysis itself, its founder has bequeathed its divisions upon psychoanalysis. While Bergmann was receptive to new ideas, he was not in favor of an uncritical eclecticism. With regard to the first controversy in the history of psychoanalysis, Bergmann observed that Adler and Freud were dealing with two schools of therapy grounded in different basic assumptions of human nature and distinct techniques of therapy. As was the case with Freud and Adler’s disagreements and continues to be the case in current controversies, the psychoanalytic process does not provide a suitable forum to adjudicate these differences. Distinguishing between disagreements
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in psychoanalysis and in the natural sciences, Bergmann argued that the latter could often be resolved through further experimentation, while the former are more like religious or philosophical controversies, which cannot be reconciled by rational means. Dogmatism, Bergmann argued, arises at those points where psychoanalysis cannot provide an answer. In the absence of a means of contesting differences of opinion, Bergmann (2004b) adopted a pragmatic perspective, arguing that different ways of understanding clinical phenomena offered by different therapists increase clinical sensitivity by expanding the repertoire of ways of organizing and interpreting clinical data. At the same time, the recognition that clinical material can be interpreted in different ways raised “a question of the role of truth in the treatment process” (Bergmann, 2004b, p. 13). The second volume of a series of books developed by Bergmann (2000a) under the auspices of the Psychoanalytic Research and Development Fund, titled ,The Hartmann Era, dealt with the period when Hartmann was viewed, at least within American psychoanalysis, as the undisputed leader of psychoanalysis. Viewing Hartmann as a “modifier,”1 Bergmann traced the revisions that Hartmann made in psychoanalytic thinking. He argued that Hartmann’s influence has waned, particularly with regard to the concepts of the conflict-free sphere, neutralization, secondary autonomy, and change of function. Brenner’s (1982) idea that better compromise formations replaced neurotic compromise formations implies that core conflicts are not fully resolvable. With this modification of Hartmann, Brenner restored the notion that conflict is ubiquitous, and supplanted the idea of the conflict-free sphere. Bergmann (2000a) maintained, It seems to me that the Hartmann era did not survive the deaths of its creators for the following reason: it did not live up to its promise to create a psychology beyond the realm of conflict. As a result, it had less to offer to the social sciences than it believed. . . . Also, as the turbulent sixties began, when the crisis of identity deepened and cultural narcissism increasingly became the norm, Kernberg, Kohut, Erikson, and Loewald were more in tune with the new generation than the Hartmannites. (p. 63)
Appraising Hartmann’s legacy, Bergmann noted that the passing of an era left behind a series of new problems not previously an-
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ticipated. Psychoanalytic controversies such as the following originated in the Hartmann era: (1) whether infant observations and research contribute to psychoanalysis, (2) whether men and women develop from symbiosis to independence or sustain a lifelong need for a self-object, and (3) the issue of developmental arrest versus intrapsychic conflict. These debates also revealed the extent to which psychoanalysis had been infiltrated by philosophical ideas. Bergmann pointed out that, once again, one’s allegiance in these controversies does not emerge from observations made in the consulting room, but, rather, is based on an analyst’s Weltanschauung or perhaps his or her unconscious needs. Turning his attention to the shift from the topographic to the structural model, Bergmann (2011) observed that structural theory had a traumatic impact on psychoanalysts because it called into question the curative potential of psychoanalysis. He asserted that with the shift to the structural model, psychoanalytic work became more difficult; the task of the psychoanalyst became more challenging and the benefits of psychoanalysis more unclear. According to the earlier model, the task of the analyst was merely to overcome repression and facilitate the emergence of the patient’s unconscious wishes, which were thought to be pushing upward, via dreams and slips of the tongue, into consciousness. With the structural model, the possibility of eradicating internal conflict was no longer considered to be possible; rather, one could only achieve a different balance between the conflicting interests. “Furthermore,” Bergmann (2011), stated, “under the structural point of view, the impact of the death instinct was much harder to combat and the repetition compulsion was a more tenacious adversary” (p. 672). Considering crossroads in theorizing to be a fruitful line of inquiry, Bergmann sought to understand the profound change in Freud’s thinking that took place between Studies on Hysteria (1895) and The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). This revision in Freud’s ideas led to several of his most significant discoveries, including the findings that dreams have meaning, which can be discerned through the technique of free association, and that all people possess unconscious thoughts and wishes that shape their lives while remaining unknown to them. With this, the demarcation between normal and neurotic became far less clearly defined. This shift also moved psychoanalysis from being primarily focused on the
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process of cure to a broader concern with the understanding of culture and human nature. Bergmann documented the role of Freud’s self-analysis, particularly his discovery of the Oedipus complex, in this transformation of his thinking. Bergmann’s contributions to a psychoanalytic understanding of the nature of love are well known. In several recent papers that dealt with love both in real life and in the analytic context, he continued to make use of Freud’s idea that all finding (of love) is a “re-finding.” To this, he added his own essential contribution that people seek out love objects who will heal the wounds inflicted by early objects, hoping to find in them what they did not get from their parents. He then used this idea in understanding the impediments to finding an object and to falling in love. In one paper, “On Love and Its Enemies” (Bergmann, 1995), he made two observations that added to his earlier contributions about an understanding of love. First, he noted that the adult love object is often unable to heal the wounds of childhood that a person seeks in relationships. When this happens, the person may feel betrayed by and come to hate the object who awakens a promise without fulfilling it. Bergmann’s second idea, relating to factors that interfere with the capacity to love, has to do with situations where children have more than one primary object. In these cases, “each love object will seek its own re-finding” (p. 9). Individuals with this background may have difficulty focusing their love on one object and may need more than one object at a time or different ones serially. A paper titled “The Woman I Love and the Woman I Cannot Live Without” (2013c) built on his earlier formulation that the longing for merger, a residue of the symbiotic phase of development, is re-evoked when one falls in love. His reformulation emphasized the importance of the capacity to experience and tolerate separateness in understanding love relationships. This capacity allows one to bear the loss of boundaries that accompanies the revival of symbiotic wishes, to experience the otherness of the love object, and to tolerate missing someone—all prerequisites for the capacity to love. Thus, a happy love entails a balancing of both the need to merge and the need to maintain a sense of a separate identity. Equilibrium can be threatened both, by too much symbiosis or too much separateness.
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In “The Challenge of Erotized Transference to Psychoanalytic Technique,” Bergmann (1994a) extended his studies of love to an understanding of the erotized transference. He eschewed the distinction between real and transference love, noting that one finds the tendency to re-find people who are similar in character to early objects in order to heal past wounds inflicted by those early objects. Bergmann rejected Freud’s grim view of the possibility of treating patients suffering from erotized transference who accept nothing less than, in Freud’s words, “soup and dumplings,” arguing that Freud’s pessimism derived from a loss of a neutral and empathic psychoanalytic stance. Reflecting his unyielding belief in the psychoanalytic process, Bergmann believed that when an analyst maintains a tolerant attitude and attends to the minutiae of the patient’s associations, the patient will eventually reveal new motifs and possibilities that convey what is behind the erotized transference. Interestingly, Bergmann, unexpectedly attentive to the interactive dimension of psychoanalysis, advised analysts “to consider what they did or did not do to instigate this love or to bring it into the service of the analysis, as a corrective to the fact that the literature on erotized transferences is written … in the language of a one-person psychology” (p. 514). In “Passions in the Therapeutic Relationship: A Historical Perspective” (1997b), a paper that is pertinent to discussions of sexual boundary crossing, Bergmann used the relationships between Jung and Ferenczi and their respective analysands, Sabina Spielrein and Elma Palos, to investigate the analyst’s experience of love, highlighting conditions which make analysts vulnerable to falling in love with their patients. His recognition of the power of those conditions is evident in his plea that analysts should be cautious in their judgments towards those who fail in the task of channeling the patient’s love into the service of the task of analyzing and understanding. He wrote, “Freud’s idea to tame love and make it serviceable for therapy was original and bold. We must keep in mind, however, that it is not the natural aim of love and if in a number of cases it miscarries, we should, not in my opinion, judge too harshly those who have failed in this effort” (p. 92). Bergmann’s recognition of the challenge of working as an analyst, along with his capacity for empathy and his nonjudgmental stance are evident in this remark.
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Throughout his career, Bergmann has made significant creative contributions to applied psychoanalysis. He studied two figures that he claimed as ancestors of psychoanalysis, Rembrandt and Shakespeare. Bergmann recalled one of his teachers, Paul Federn, quoting Freud: “when you think of me, think of Rembrandt, a little light and a great deal of darkness” (Bergmann, 2006, p. 977). Both Shakespeare and Rembrandt, Bergmann noted, have enhanced society’s capacity to turn one’s gaze inward. Bergmann wrote extensively about Shakespeare’s work. In “The Inability to Mourn and the Inability to Love in Shakespeare’s Hamlet” (2009a), he argued that Hamlet is a creative projection of Shakespeare’s inability to mourn. Writing the play served as self-therapy in a moment of inner turmoil following the death of Shakespeare’s only son (p. 399). The book What Silent Love Hath Writ: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Bergmann & Bergmann, 2009), coauthored by Bergmann’s son, Michael Bergmann, began with an assumption that the “I” of the sonnets is a single character— either Shakespeare or a character of his creation. This strategy, they argued, allowed them to make connections between disparate contents and arrive at a coherent picture, just as one might interpret a patient’s associations. This perspective enabled the authors to decode the major themes in the sonnets and illuminated the thought processes of the character that they referred to as the Poet of the Sonnets. The Bergmanns pointed out that the sonnets “are not traditional hymns to love, but expressions of inner conflict. Three types of love compete with each other: homosexual love for a young man, heterosexual attraction for a dark lady and self-love” (p. 9). In the first chapter, the Bergmanns used four sonnets to introduce the major themes that they believed were evident throughout these verses, including the Poet’s anxiety about his mortality and his view of time as an adversary, the Poet’s struggle to surmount his self-love in order to love others, and the Poet’s love of nature and the way this love revealed his affection for the Young Man and the Dark Lady of the sonnets. Bergmann’s (2013b) second book on Shakespeare, The Unconscious in Shakespeare’s Plays, was written with the idea that, for many readers, an understanding of what was unconscious in Shakespeare’s plays and of what one might discern of Shakespeare’s unconscious deepens the pleasure of reading Shakespeare and
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enriches the reader’s understanding. Cross-referencing themes emerging in different plays provides clues to unconscious connections that are not revealed by an individual play. This then sheds light on the intrapsychic issues that may have been disturbing Shakespeare at the time he wrote different plays and offers insight into how his plays represent his attempts to resolve these issues. Bergmann revisited the Oedipus complex in two recent papers. In one, Bergmann (2013a) argued that two significant childhood events—the Oedipus complex and sibling rivalry—with their many variations are inseparable and interwoven, influencing each other and leaving their imprint on adult sexuality. In the cases presented in this paper, Bergmann showed how the birth and presence of siblings led his patients to turn to the other parent to re-find the blissful union that was lost and to replace the object who perpetrated the disappointment. In the second paper, “The Oedipus Complex and Psychoanalytic Technique” (2010), he reminded his readers that when the idea of the Oedipus complex occurred to Freud, it was accompanied by a fleeting sense that the phenomena of being in love with one’s mother and jealous of the father that accounted for the power of Oedipus Rex might also explain Hamlet’s irresolution. Freud’s achievement, Bergmann maintained, was the connection he made between personal experience and the dramas of Oedipus and Hamlet, which led to his discerning universal phenomena of childhood. In this paper, Bergmann considers the technical implications of his observation relating to how derivatives of the Oedipus complex appear in clinical settings. Observing that both sides of the Oedipus complex, the murderous and the incestuous, are rarely portrayed jointly in literature and tend not to appear at once in the consulting room, Bergmann concludes, “the full Oedipus is not experienced and has to be reconstructed by the therapist” (p. 537). This observation is refined through Bergmann’s differentiation of construction and interpretation. Interpretations are evoked in the analyst by something the patient says. Surprising the analyst when they arise, interpretations occur in response to an analysand’s associations and memories, and are accompanied by a “strong emotional experience”,and with “recognition of why the analysand cannot attain the insight without assistance” (Bergmann, 2010, p. 538). It is possible to convey the interpretation to a
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patient as soon as he or she pauses, without consideration of tact and timing. Constructions, however, do not emerge with an “Aha” moment of discovery; rather, they are based on the application of a more general psychoanalytic understanding. Recognition of the current application to the patient confers a sense of affective significance and immediacy to them. Also, in contrast with interpretation, timing is crucial for reconstruction as it will not be convincing to patients if offered too early, but when it is neglected patients tend to go in circles, unable to overcome their inhibitions on their own. It is better to wait to offer a reconstruction until one has accumulated many derivatives. Bergmann points out that “every patient has his or her variant of the Oedipus complex and it is the detection of this unique variant that gives the Oedipus complex its curative power . . . . we should preserve this uniqueness and therefore introduce the construction of the Oedipus complex in a later phase of the analysis, rather than as soon as the first derivatives appear” (p. 539). Bergmann frequently refers to the requirement that the analyst balance the patient’s limitations in getting past inhibitions on his or her own and the value of waiting to tell the patient something until it is likely to be emotionally meaningful. While he noted the risk that premature communication can be detrimental when a patient uses it to strengthen his or her resistances to treatment or when it leads to an overly intellectual understanding, he placed somewhat more emphasis on the problems that result from excessive delay in interpreting, repeatedly calling attention to the deleterious effects of the analyst’s passivity (Bergmann, 1993b, 2003). His concern stems from several related observations: First, patients come to treatment because of conflicts they cannot master on their own; second, they are usually unable to attain the depth of insight needed to relieve their conflicts through self-analysis; and third, most of the people who consult a psychoanalyst are quite limited in what they can tell him or her about themselves. They will eventually begin to go in circles, repeating what has already been said. In Bergmann’s view, the analyst must take an active role in breaking through the repetitive cycle that arises when analysts leave their patients to struggle on their own or to figure things out on their own. The analyst’s main task, he said, is to safeguard the analytic process and “at times, set it in motion” (1993c, p. 381).
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For the most part, this is accomplished through interpretation. In a paper written for a panel on supervision that was part of a symposium on training and education, Bergmann (2003) concisely summarizes his therapeutic philosophy in a fifteen-point guide that would serve well as an outline for a course on psychoanalytic technique. In this brief guide, he referred to the therapist’s active role in several places, commenting that “the initial inquiry period should be an active one during which the therapist develops the therapeutic strategy” (p. 331). At another point, he warned that if the therapist just listens without intervening and finding “a way to break through the manifest circle and lead the patient to an unexpected and deeper understanding of himself or herself” (p. 329), the treatment is likely to become stalemated, as a result of reaching “an equilibrium of forces” (p. 329). Bergmann considered the analyst to be more responsible for the advancement of the treatment than the patient. The skills and talents that an analyst must possess to be able to mobilize an analysis include “sensitivity to the inner experience of the patient, . . . familiarity with the language of the unconscious” (p. 331), “a capacity to awaken curiosity in the patient to his or her own psychological processes . . . and a capacity to interpret the forces in a patient that oppose the success of the treatment” (p. 332). Notably, this responsibility of the analyst extends to termination as well, where Bergmann considers the analyst to play a significant role in whether the analysis ends in a stalemate or reaches a satisfactory conclusion. Not surprisingly, in 2005 Bergmann was asked to write a chapter on termination, titled “Termination and Reanalysis,” for a textbook on psychoanalysis (now in its second edition; Bergmann, 2012). In this chapter he builds on two earlier papers he wrote on the subject. He observed that he had been prevented from thinking through the issue fully in the earlier papers “out of a sense of guilt toward Freud for understanding the history of psychoanalysis in a way he could not” (p. 241), claiming, drolly, that he was able to take this step now that he is past his ninetieth birthday. Bergmann distinguished between a group of patients who are better able to arrive at a reasonably satisfactory termination and others who seem to require continuing and often lifelong support to keep functioning. Discussing the technical implications of this distinction, Bergmann noted that every psychoanalytic cure
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involves two factors: The first consists of insights gained through the experience of recovering repressed contents, which lead to revisions of one’s picture of oneself and the major love objects in one’s life, and the second consists of a “corrective emotional experience,” which comes about when the therapist responds in ways that differ from the patient’s expectations and from the ways early parental figures behaved. He then hypothesized that in the treatment of more disturbed patients, the corrective emotional experience will be more important, hence termination of the treatment will be more difficult for these patients. Bergmann explains, To the extent that the analyst is a transference figure either as a result of displacement from parental figures or as a projection of unacceptable aspects of the self, the end of the analysis can be reached. But to the extent that the psychoanalyst is a new object . . . and the therapist becomes a primary object like the parent termination becomes uncertain. . . . Only a transference relationship has a termination point; a primary relationship cannot be terminated. (p. 246)
I believe one can safely argue that there is no psychoanalyst better equipped than Bergmann to address the topic of one of his most recent papers, “Psychoanalysis in Old Age: The Patient and the Analyst” (2014). He first dispensed with Freud’s skepticism about the analysis of older people. Freud (1898) believed that these analyses would only lead to regrets without the possibility of using the insight gained for new and more productive endeavors. The analysis, according to Freud, would not “pay for itself” and would only lead to regret and self-recrimination. Bergmann abjured Freud’s view, considering it to be “too commercial,” noting that it is “as if psychoanalysis has to be financially profitable to be worth the effort and expense” (pp. 2-3). For Bergmann, borrowing a slogan from the shipping industry, “Getting there is half the fun.” Moreover, he argued, it is the analyst’s job to ensure that our understanding is communicated to patients in a manner that the ego can use, and not subject to the requirements of the superego and the id. Bergmann pointed out that the disappearance of the future, one of the central characteristics of old age, tends to highlight the past, resulting in a “compulsory re-examination” (2014, p. 4) of the past. One of the main tasks of the analyst in this pro-
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cess is to ensure this process does not fall under the domination of the superego and result in depression. Bergmann enumerated the problems that elderly patients bring to treatment, suggesting that the most prevalent concern lies in their relationship to their adult children, followed next by problems in the sphere of love. In this, the elderly patient is hardly distinguishable from our younger patients. Similarly, another category that Bergmann considers is the “existential patient,” whose chief complaint is that he or she has not lived his or her life fully and does not wish to die before attaining a fuller life. The realization that death and life are inseparable was an important insight in Bergmann’s personal philosophy of life and death. He noted the irony in the fact that humans are the only species that can recognize the inevitability of death, yet they do so much to deny this knowledge. Basing his view on his clinical experience, he suggested that the presence of good internal objects enables one to accept death, adding that it is helpful in this regard to have been wanted by one’s parents. Informing our understanding of why Bergmann (2010) avoided retiring are his comments that analysts can never retire because it takes us so long to become any good at analyzing, and (as he told a class of graduates at the NYU Postdoctoral Institute several years ago) that his life “has been an enormous journey, an interesting life,” and, most importantly, one that enabled him to “avoid retiring in Florida and spending a boring life.” Note 1. In his early work on the history of psychoanalytic technique, Bergmann (1976, with F. Hartmann) divided analytic theorists after Freud into “extenders” and “modifiers.”
REFERENCES Bergmann, M. S., ed., with Hartmann, F. (1976). The evolution of psychoanalytic technique. New York: Basic Books. _______ (1993a). [Review of the book Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling: A psychoanalytic study, by Jerome Oremland]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 41:886892. _______ (1993b). Psychoanalytic education and the social reality of psychoanalysis. Psychoanal. Rev., 80:199-210.
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_______ (1993c). Reality and psychic reality in Ernst Kris’s last papers: An attempt to update his findings. Psychoanal. Inq., 13:372–383. _______ (1994a). The challenge of erotized transference to psychoanalytic technique. Psychoanal. Inq., 14:499-518. _______ (1994b). [Review of the book Freud’s Moses-Studie Als Tagtraum, by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 42:898-901. _______ (1995). On love and its enemies. Psychoanal. Rev., 82:1-19. _______ (1996). [Review of the book Psychology of a saint: Ignatius of Loyola, by W. W. Meissner]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 44:611-618. _______ (1997a). [Review of the book The languages of psychoanalysis, by John Gedo]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 78:173-175. _______ (1997b). Passions in the therapeutic relationship. Psychoanal. Inq., 5:73-94. _______ (1999). [Review of the book Moses and civilization: The meaning behind Freud’s myth, by Robert Paul]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 47:14111414. _______ (2000a). The Hartmann era. New York: Other Press. _______ (2000b). [Review of the book Lay analysis: Life inside the controversy, by Robert S. Wallerstein]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 69:162-167. _______ (2003). A contribution to the supervisory panel. Psychoanal. Dial., 13:327-339. _______ (2004a). [Review of the book Psychoanalysis and the humanities: The preference for the primitive episodes in the history of Western taste and art, by E. H. Gombrich]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 52:301-306. _______ (2004b). Understanding dissidence and controversy in the history of psychoanalysis. New York: Other Press. _______ (2005). [Review of the book The psychoanalytic wars of yesterday: Otto Fenichel 119 rundbriefe (one hundred nineteen circular letters) (19341945). Two volumes, by Johannes Reichmayr and Else Muhlleitner]. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assoc., 53:663-672. _______ (2006). A psychoanalytic study of Rembrandt’s self-portraits. Psychoanal. Rev., 93:977-990. _______ (2009a). The inability to mourn and the inability to love in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Psychoanal. Inq., 78:397-423. _______ (2009b). The 1993 symposium on psychoanalytic education. Psychoanal. Rev., 96:405-409. _______ (2010). The Oedipus complex and psychoanalytic technique. Psychoanal. Inq., 30:535-540. _______ (2010, June). Graduation address, New York University Postdoctoral Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. _______ (2011). The dual impact of Freud’s death and Freud’s death instinct theory on the history of psychoanalysis. Psychoanal. Rev., 98:685696. _______ (2012). Termination and reanalysis. In. G. O. Gabbard, E. E. Litowitz, & P. Williams, eds., Textbook of psychoanalysis (2nd ed., pp. 303-318). Arlington, Va.: American Psychiatric Publishing. _______ (2013a). Credo. Psychoanal. Dial., 23:261-268. _______ (2013b). The unconscious in Shakespeare’s plays. London: Karnac. _______ (2013c). The woman I love and the woman I cannot live without. Psychoanal. Rev., 100:769-774.
MARTIN BERGMANN 421 _______ (2014). Psychoanalysis in old age: The patient and the analyst. In S, Kuchuck, ed., Clinical implications of the psychoanalyst’s life experience: When the personal becomes professional (pp. 237-246). London: Routledge. _______ & Bergmann, M. (2009). What silent love hath writ: A psychoanalytic exploration of Shakespeare’s sonnets. New York: Gotschna Ventures. Brenner, C. (1982). The mind in conflict. New York: International Universities Press. Freud, S. (1898). Sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses. In J. Strachey, ed. and trans., The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974. 3:259-285. Richards, A. K., & Richards, A. D., eds. (1994). The spectrum of psychoanalysis: Essays in honor of Martin Bergmann. Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press.
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The Psychoanalytic Review Vol. 102, No. 3, June 2015
