Psychoanalysis suffers from a relative dearth of personal video interviews—particularly of luminaries reflecting on the field’s tumultuous evolution. Covering the days of Freud to musings on the future, this expansive interview will satisfy your desire for tales of the field’s rich history, political intrigue, and cultural depth, as told by the renowned Robert Wallerstein. Here, you’ll get an inside peek at the development of modern psychoanalysis from a man who entered the field during World War II, led research at the original Menninger Clinic, and presided over the International Psychoanalytical Association during the 1992 lawsuit that opened the field to a new generation of clinicians.
Interviewed by Dr. Shelley Nathans in the year before his passing, Wallerstein describes his early life in Depression-era New York City, where he moved with his mother at age 2 from Berlin. Intellectually sharp even into his 90s, he recounts his parents’ individual and marital struggles, his time in Mexico City as a teen, meeting his future wife, Judith—later a celebrated researcher in her own right—as a Columbia undergrad, and his tenure in WWII, complete with an overview of the analyst exodus from Europe and the internal controversies surrounding it.
Wallerstein continues to compel with anecdotes of the early days with Karl Menninger, a midcentury analytic field that shunned “deviants” such as Kohut and Klein, and the continuing divide over training requirements that threatened to split APSA from the international community. You’ll get nuggets of insight on the rift between Anna Freud and Margaret Mahler and the latter’s rift with Erikson, and you’ll hear about Wallerstein’s early-’80s investigation of the Rio de Janeiro Psychoanalytic Institute, which played a role in the torture of political prisoners.
Both riveting and resonant, this video offers an accessible window into psychoanalysis from a pioneer with a wide-ranging career and a lasting impact on the field. If you’re interested in the history psychoanalysis, be sure to take a look.
