An Interview with Estelle Shane, Ph.D.

Kati Breckenridge, Ph.D.

Kati: The best thing about being one of the online editors for this newsletter is being able to interview you, Estelle. As your friend and colleague it would be a pleasure at any time, but it is particularly timely now as you will become the new President of IAPSP in October, 2007. However, I'd like to begin with another accomplishment. You were one of the original twelve analysts who conceived of and created the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (ICP) in Los Angeles in 1991. ICP produced a big change in the psychoanalytic world, and was a huge undertaking. Why did you want to create a new psychoanalytic institute?

Estelle: I think it was many things. As much as anything else, I was offended by the way psychoanalysis was being taught at the American Psychoanalytic Association affiliated institute where I was trained, and in which I was a training analyst. But, thinking about it, more offensive even than that was the certification process for graduate analysts who wanted to achieve the position of training analyst in their own institutes. The certification process was a function of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and I found it totally reprehensible. To give you an example, a graduate from the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute was turned down for certification by the American because of her case write-ups. Now, I had supervised her in her work, and I knew she had dealt with the patient in question in the very same classical manner that the American required. And what the certification committee of the American looks for is whether the case write-up demonstrates an understanding and application of classical psychoanalytic theory. As I say, I knew this candidate had analyzed her patient in a classical manner. But in the last session of the analysis, she answered a question her analysand had been asking for the entire five years of their work together. The patient said to her in this last session, "Look, the analysis is done; will you please finally tell me where you got that painting?" The analyst responded to her patient that she and her husband had done an externship in Mexico during one of their semesters of medical school, and it was in Mexico that they had found this art piece. The patient was delighted because he had been to the very same town in Mexico. He knew that he had recognized the style of this piece of art and they both in this last session enjoyed comparing notes about the artist and the town in Mexico. Then the American failed the analyst in her effort to achieve certification because, as the committee told her, she had ruined the entire analytic process by giving her patient what they called an oedipal victory, an unthinkable analytic error, and certainly unworthy of certification.

This to me was truly non-sensible. Her institute had evaluated her as exceptional, one of the best candidates they had ever graduated. But when the American says she's no good, what does the institute do? They don't fight; they don't say, "How dare you overrule the estimation of the institute that knew her and trained her!" They say instead, "Oh, I guess we must have missed something. Yes indeed, she is inadequate, or in any case, not eligible for training analyst status." That was deeply offensive to me, and there were many other things as well, that troubled me. To me, it encapsulated the way in which the American controlled and infantilized institutes and the institutes accommodated to and cooperated with this infantilization process. Institutes didn't stand behind their candidates, nor behind the education they themselves had provided. They didn't stand behind the supervisions for which they were extending credit. They were ready to remove all credibility from the candidate they had trained. That sort of thing made me feel like it was time for a change, time for the creation of an institute independent of an overall governing body, for an institute that was organized by a pluralistic curriculum where no one treatment model trumped all others. Time, then, for an institute of contemporary psychoanalysis.

It was around then that I got a call from Bob Stolorow who said, "You know how we both have been dreaming about setting up a new psychoanalytic institute, were you serious about that; were you really ready to do it? Because there is now a group of twelve of us, including you and Mort, who are ready to go." It was Sunday night and we got together one evening in that very week and talked enthusiastically about what everyone's hopes and dreams were, their goals, their ideals, their values, what we all thought a contemporary psychoanalytic curriculum should look like. We set up a specific date before which time we would keep our plans secret. On a designated date the community was notified by letter that the doors of ICP would be open for the first class of analytic candidates in September, 1991. Interested prospective candidates were invited to apply, and all graduate analysts would be accepted—without question—as members if they applied within a time frame. The letter was sent on January 1, 1991.

K: There were many applicants that year. As you know, I was in that first class. I remember wanting to study what was current in psychoanalysis, not have to wait years while studying classical psychoanalysis as I would have had to in any of the other institutes.

E: Yes, the courses were about what was contemporary on the analytic scene, our strategy being if you were going to train in a science you probably wouldn't start your education with dated ideas. You would start with current understanding. Why not do the same with psychoanalytic training?

K: Another of the founding members of ICP was Mort Shane, your former husband. The two of you published a lot together over the years. I've enjoyed your articles, especially the classic "Self Psychology After Kohut: One Theory or Many?" which I always use for teaching. You and Mort also did the book Intimate Attachments: Towards a New Self Psychology, along with Mary Gales. Can you tell us about your published work: the process, the pleasure, the stress? What you would change?

E: You know I think there is nothing I wouldn't want to change, more or less. My vision of the field does change, and change progressively. But I always think, when I reread them, that our articles were well written, and there is some satisfaction in that. Well, the way we wrote the book Intimate Attachments was that all three of us—Mort, Mary, and I—were together in the writing process consistently, no one writing anything apart from the other two. And at the beginning it was very smooth and enjoyable. I would always be the one to sit at the computer, and we would all talk. Then I would write down what we had said after we had argued it out. Everything in that book was always debated and argued among the three of us.

K: You've also written about the effect of the divorce on your practice.

E: Yes. My practice . . . how it was to treat patients while getting a divorce in a very public way, with patients who knew only too well what I was going through. I think that I hadn't known to what extent I wasn't fully available to myself during this period of analytic work, how much I dissociated. I think . . . no, I know, it must have affected my patients in important ways. But I also think the experience changed me and my work for the better. I felt good about all that I was learning about myself in this process, yet it was very, very painful. It was often shameful and humiliating for me, but also, paradoxically, freeing. Once we were completely separated, on the way to divorce, I felt a sense of freedom to think and write that I had never felt before, and I had to conclude that I had been constrained for quite a while without knowing it, in both my thinking about my analytic work and in my writing. At the end of my divorce process I presented a paper at the Relational Conference in Rome about my experience called "Living with a Living Loss: Transcending Shame and Blame." It was a kind of making peace with the experience. I think that paper was what I needed to write in order to be able to reflect on it. It was satisfying and reparative for me.

K: Children? You have two children I believe.

E: I have two children, two boys, both of whom are married, both of whom themselves have children. I am also remarried to a man with two children of his own, so we have developed this large and wonderful family. What's amazing to me is how a life that had seemed so comfortable and gratifying had changed so drastically in so many ways, offering me a new life that has its own gratifications, its own excitements, its own ways of being. And there were things I experienced which I would never have experienced without divorcing and remarrying. In some sense, it offered much that was new and positive, even though my loss of a long and, for me, a happy and productive marriage is forever engrained in my sense of my self and of my past life. I remember telling a close friend about a story I had read many years ago taken from a novel by Floyd Maddox Ford called The Good Soldier. I must have read that novel maybe 30 years ago. It seemed to have nothing to do with me, but yet this story had always stayed with me. The main character discovers that his wife, whom he had been happily married to for many years, was actually having an affair, and that the affair had been ongoing for a good part of the marriage. He thinks to himself, "A man eats an apple down to the core, and the apple had tasted good all the way through. But then the man discovers that there's a worm at the apple's core." He asks himself, "Is this a good apple? Or is this a rotten apple?" The question that the character is asking is, was mine a good marriage because it had always seemed good, or was it really a bad marriage because it was actually flawed from the very beginning? I had been profoundly struck by the thought, even though I had no idea that it would ever pertain to me, to my own life. But then the paragraph came back to haunt me.

As for my own kids, grown up as they were, they were terribly hurt and disappointed. It hadn't seemed possible to them that their parents would ever divorce. That was true of my grandchildren as well. Of course they've all moved on, but to me it is surprising that fully grown children still react so strongly to the break up of their family of origin. But they have adapted, and now enjoy relationships with the new family we have formed together with my husband, Arthur, and his children and grandchildren, and, presumably, with Mort's new family as well.

K: Your new house, Estelle, is full of sunshine and bright colors and books, whole walls of books. You even have one of those English style library ladders that allow you to select books from near the ceiling. So I know, for you, that books are extremely important. You write beautifully too; did you ever desire to be a writer?

E: No, because I never thought that I could. For example, I never had a history of writing like people who as children had written poetry and short stories. When I started college I had been given a placement test in English. I discovered to my great amazement that I had excelled, placing at the top of a very large body of students. So I discovered that I could write, or so they thought. I got my Ph.D. in English, ultimately, at UCLA. I did a great deal of writing and I enjoyed it enormously. But it's never been fiction. I've never written fiction.

K: What was your educational path?

E: I never really had any ambition to be anything in particular. I felt deprived because I had dropped out of college in order to work to put Mort through medical school. What I wanted was education and a degree, to feel less shame about being a college drop out. When I started back to school at UCLA, after my two boys had started elementary school, I would take courses almost at random, for example, in Russian literature in translation, in art history, in Victorian literature . . . you know, just a whole potpourri of courses. Mort tried to straighten me out, to provide some discipline. He said to me, "Settle down. No, don't be a dilettante; treat yourself like you are a man!"

K: As in pursue a goal?

E: Yes, pursue a goal. He said, "Don't waste your time with just taking courses at random." So I chose English literature as the only thing sufficiently dilettante-feeling to me. I knew I would never want to teach English literature, not just because it was hard as a woman to be hired in a university in those days, but because to me it seemed ridiculous to try to tell people what was beautiful in what they were reading. I mean, it just didn't make sense to me. I did want a profession though that would allow me to work, so then I decided to go into education where I imagined that there would be more work opportunities of interest to me. All it took for me to earn a Ph.D. in education at UCLA was a few courses in education and some work experience.

K: From English, to education, to psychoanalysis, how was that?

E: Well, let's see, I got my degree in education, and my advisor told me: "They're looking for someone to initiate and direct an elementary school at the Center for Early Childhood Education." Up until that time it had been only a nursery school, a very popular, well-known, psychoanalytically-oriented, nursery school that actually had on its original board Anna Freud, Margaret Mead, and Ralph Greenson. A lot of people were interested in psychoanalytically-oriented early childhood education because Anna Freud had a great deal to say about child development up to age 5. So the Center for Early Childhood Education was organized around those principles. Now when I was finishing at UCLA, the board of the nursery school was wanting to set up to extend their school with an elementary school because the parent body wanted their kids to remain at the Center for elementary school. So the idea was for me, as the new director, to set up a psychoanalytically-oriented elementary school.

K: You did that! It must have been quite a task.

E: It was quite a task. First of all, I was not really equipped for any part of this job because I had never taught; never been in a nursery school, never been in an elementary school, and wasn't a teacher. But I had a degree in education which their Board thought was appropriate background. Secondly, I didn't know anything about psychoanalysis at that point. Still, they hired me. But then I said to them, "What does an elementary school organized by psychoanalytic principles look like?" And they said, "We don't know; it's your job to know." So, then I went ahead and applied for admission for analytic training at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute.

K: Would you have done it otherwise?

E: No.

K: So you became a Research Candidate. How was it to train in psychoanalysis at the time?

E: At the time I thought, "What kind of idiocy is this?" My first course was taught by a Kleinian who was visiting from England. It was on the technique of doing analysis using the dream. What he did was present a verbatim report over a period of 10 weeks from an analysis in which everything was perceived through dream work. This was because this analyst believed that the dream is a direct expression of the id, which is where the unconscious lies and everything important to know about an analysand is what comes from the unconscious and therefore the subjective experience of the patient is irrelevant to psychoanalysis. He showed us how he used the dreams in the analysis, how he interpreted the dream, and how the patient responded. At the end of the class, the teacher said, "So, over the course of this analysis the patient had married and had two children, but I didn't know about these events until the analysis was over." When the class asked, "How can that be?" He responded, "Well, it didn't appear in his dreams, so it was nothing to me as his analyst." This was not what I had learned about human nature in all the novels I had read so I wondered what I was doing there. But I stayed in the training program anyway and it was interesting studying Freud. You know, we spent 3 years on Freud. And though studying Freud had its value, I kept thinking, "So when are they going to teach me how to do this?"

K: How to actually do an analysis?

E: Yes, but wait! I have to tell you about my first adult patient. He was a man with the highest clearance who was working with the government on a secret project. He was very, very smart, and he would lie on the couch and talk, then pause, then talk again. He felt that there was no one able to communicate with him because no one was on his intellectual level. He had had that trouble throughout school. Kids didn't like him, and he didn't like them. My supervisor, my first analytic supervisor, would point to this as transference feelings. "Well, this is transference," he would explain to me. "This patient obviously is having strong loving, sexual feelings for you. That's transference; that's what transference is. So when the patient pauses in his conversation you know that's resistance and what you do is interpret the resistance. But you don't begin with an interpretation; you first begin with an observation or confrontation, then resistance, and then working through." That was the model. So when the patient stopped talking, I was to say, "I noticed you stopped talking, there must be something on your mind you don't want to say." And that happened a couple of times with no response at all. So then I was told to say, "You must be thinking about me." And I said that a couple of times, before my patient finally turned around and said to me, "What are you talking about? You're a shrinky-centric person! Why should I even talk to you?" So that was my first adult supervision experience.

K: Great story! Then what did you do?

E: I started lying to my supervisor and I stopped listening to what he told me to do. I was just trying to learn what they meant by these strange concepts, even though I would never dream of applying them. By that time I was in my fourth year and we began to read contemporary literature like Ralph Greenson.

K: How did you encounter self psychology?

E: Well, while I was in analytic training and I was still at the Center for Early Education, I was asked to edit a book that Arnold Goldberg and John Gedo were writing that, of course, was heavily based on self psychology. Arnie is a close friend of mine and so he was the one who actually asked me. And reading and editing it, I learned. The book was about different models of the mind; it was fascinating to me. I had not met Kohut at that point. So I began to read Kohut. I didn't talk about it in my classes, nor in my psychoanalysis, but I did apply it in my work with teachers at the Center for Early Childhood Education. The theory was so helpful in my supervision of the staff that I wrote an article about it that was published in an educational journal. I wrote about conveying to the teachers at the Center that it was helpful to children who sought to idealize them not to disrupt the idealization out of their own discomfort or modesty. I taught them that parents too had transferences to teachers, and when they walked into a teacher's office, they became like children themselves, looking up to the teachers, being at their mercy, psychologically speaking. There was a great deal I learned, and felt profoundly affected by, insights such as these from self psychological understandings.

K: You finally found something applicable.

E: Yes, I was really happy, and I when I finally got the nerve to tell my training analyst about it, he said to me, "Come on, you don't think there's anything that Kohut does that I don't!" "Yeah, sure . . .," I thought. Self psychology was not popular in my classical institute.

K: Who had the biggest influence on you in psychoanalysis?

E: Kohut, clearly Kohut! Kohut was unveiled to us, to Mort and me, by Arnie Goldberg. I remember we were all in San Francisco together, and Arnie had a bumper sticker made that said, "Narcissism is a separate line of development," which is early Kohutian thought and was quite mysterious to us. This was years before the first conference. But then, the year of the second psychology of the self conference the program committee asked Mort and me to formulate a Kohutian model of development.

K: You are especially good at distilling things, getting to the heart of the matter. Did Kohut recognize it too?

E: No, Kohut didn't think so at all! At the end of these yearly conferences, Kohut would rate the panels and the presenters, describing what each had done in rather glowing terms—until the year we presented. We had been asked to write a contribution on what a desirable model of development in self psychology would look like. And so what we did was create a developmental schema in which we integrated the works of Mahler, her developmental theory, and Kohut's developmental theory. While they were saying things in different ways, we wrote that they were in basic agreement. We quoted a letter Kohut had written to Margaret Mahler in which he says, "I think the two of us [Kohut and Mahler] are getting at the same thing—we're just working from different sides of the mountain." We felt that this indicated that he thought there was agreement between them, but in his address to us from the podium, Kohut took great exception. Speaking sternly to us, Kohut said, "Wrong, we're very different and here's why: Mahler in her object constancy is looking for independence and autonomy and self psychologists don't believe in independence and autonomy. Self psychologist see selfobjects as necessary throughout life. We never outgrow our need for selfobjects."

K: How did you feel?

E: Well, I felt totally intimidated, but Mort argued with him, really insisted—and this from the audience—arguing with Kohut! I was so impressed! Kohut started by saying, "Dr. Shane, Dr. Shane!" And then by the end he was saying, "Now, Mort, come on." So that year he invited us to join the Kohut Study Group.

K: Wasn't this the study group with all the luminaries in it?

E: Yes, there were Arnie Goldberg, the Tolpins, the Ornsteins, Bob Stolorow, Art Malin, Bernie Brandchaft, Evelyn Schwaber—I know I'm leaving out some.

K: On another topic, may I ask you about your early life—about your mother, father, and brother?

E: Okay. I was born in Chicago and I have a brother two years older than I. Too often during my childhood he was the major source of comfort to me. He was also my storyteller. He would tell me a story every night before sleeping. He invented characters who had different adventures. It was really a very important part of what kept me calm, regulated, and whole. My parents were very sociable people who were out almost every night of the week. They left my brother and me alone at home together. I was always scared of being alone and my brother would comfort me by telling me these stories. My brother was the most important person in my life until I got married. I went from loving my brother to loving Mort, hardly noticing the difference.

K: How would you characterize your early life and your adolescence?

E: I think my early life was filled with anxiety. I was always anxious, and the thing that organized my anxiety was that something terrible would happen to my brother. If he wasn't where I could find him . . . if I didn't know where he was . . . I was always worried about him. He'd get into fights everyday after school. I would stand there and cry, and he would turn on me and make me leave because I was embarrassing him. He was so important and I didn't realize that other people didn't feel that way about brothers until I asked my best friend when I was 13 or 14 . . . something about did she ever worry about her brother. She didn't know what I was talking about and I realized I was different in that way.

K: You're very close to your brother's daughter, your niece, Amy Eldridge.

E: Very close. I think very proudly of Amy really being my daughter. She is clearly adopted as a sister by my children, and her children feel like my grandchildren. I'm so grateful that she is in my life, and that we can share our professional lives as well as our personal lives.

K: How about your desires, your plans for the future?

E: I think no further than that I will continue practicing, teaching, and writing. I do love my work. It always seems like a privilege to be doing what we do. We get to know intimately many people whose lives we are privileged to share. On the other hand, I would like to spend more time on vacation, but I don't think of retiring. I always think of Anna Freud saying, when she was asked about retiring that she was past retirement; that she was hopelessly past retirement. I'm not at that point yet, but retirement I don't think of as ever in my future.

K: What about the future of psychoanalysis, what do you see?

E: What I see is that our field is flourishing now, I think it's because, for one thing, the field has opened up so enormously. I see increasing evidence of the inability to isolate a single theory or even a single set of theories that can be viewed as the way to practice analysis. I think there is increasing understanding that we need to accept the pluralistic nature of our field and to be grateful for it, to know that we have a multitude of ideas, good ideas, coming to us from many different theoretical sources. The theories we personally choose, I think, are those theories that best represent and match the way we think about people, who we think people are, what we think people need, what we think makes people ill, and how we think people can best be helped to get better. The theory or set of theories that comes closest to our own ideas and ideals, I think, are the theories that we choose to help us listen and to respond to our patients.

K: What about self psychology, particularly as you anticipate becoming the president of our international organization?

E: I was very drawn to self psychology from the beginning of my psychoanalytic training, even though I was trained classically. I appreciated the way Kohut conceptualized the human being and his needs and desires, and I am very pleased with the way that self psychology is expanding. Now I think of myself as a relational self psychologist, still committed to many of self psychological concepts, but also impressed with the essential contributions of intersubjective systems theory, and of many ideas drawn from relational theory. I'm a hopeless integrationist, which keeps me interested in the remarkable explosion of psychoanalytic ideas on the scene today.

Dr. Estelle Shane is President-elect of the IAPSP, taking office in October 2007. Estelle was one of the original members of a Chicago-based study group led by Heinz Kohut—a group that evolved into the present International Council for IAPSP. She is a founding member of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (ICP) in Los Angeles, and presently serves as Vice-President of that Board. She is one of the authors of the book Intimate Attachments: Towards a New Self Psychology, as well as author of numerous articles. Estelle is in private practice in West Los Angeles.

Dr. Kati Breckenridge is an analyst and a past President of ICP. She is in private practice in West Los Angeles.

Top of this Page      Newsletter Front Page