Philip Bromberg Interview
Philip Bromberg Interview
Philip Bromberg Interview
Editors’ Note: Shortly after we began our editorship, Donnel Stern sug-
gested that we devote a Special Issue to Philip Bromberg. We loved this
idea, and got the ball rolling, requesting an interview with Philip and in-
viting a number of contributors to reflect on his body of work. There is
no question that Philip’s contributions to psychoanalysis over the past
several decades are enormous—indeed, immeasurable. By elucidating
the role of developmental trauma in shame-laden dissociative processes
that impair relatedness, and by providing us with a language (e.g., mul-
tiple self-states) to comprehend this phenomenon, he has not only sig-
nificantly expanded the scope of our theoretical understanding, but given
us a way to see patients through fresh eyes and to connect empathically
with them.
323
324 DON GREIF, Ph.D. & RUTH LIVINGSTON, Ph.D.
PB: We were. It’s such a wonderful thing for me to have the opportunity
to recollect this because it brings me back to a time I hadn’t remem-
bered that I remembered.
DG: How old were you?
PB: Little. Four, 5, maybe even until 6. In my analytic relationships, ques-
tioning has always felt like a natural ingredient of the personal connec-
tion rather than something I am “doing,” and it is exciting to be so
aware that this was what made my earliest relationship, the one with
my mother, so wonderfully alive. But it isn’t only in my analytic rela-
tionships that this has shaped my adult life. Also, in my writing and
teaching I naturally raise questions about everything I hear, think, or
read—whether the focus of my question is on myself or someone else.
I am more interested in struggling with new questions than the right-
ness or wrongness of their solutions. I’m always thinking about how
this thing we call psychoanalysis works, and in a certain way, I’m al-
ways more excited by what I consider my failures than by what appear
to be my successes. Because the failures are evidence that, just as I
suspected, there’s more to it than whatever the current self-satisfied
view is that I am holding as my “truth.” So the failures force me to keep
thinking; with the successes, the effort is more optional and sometimes
I’m too lazy to say “Why was it good? Was it really? What if. . . ?”
DG: Is failure painful for you?
PB: Sometimes it is. Yeah. Because it makes me have to realize that with
certain people, more time doesn’t make me feel like we’ll get there.
Every once in awhile, there’s somebody that it doesn’t happen with,
and it’s a bad feeling to realize that I don’t know what it is that I wasn’t
in touch with, or what was taking place between us that kept us frozen
in it.
DG: Do you ever feel pulled into thinking that the fault lays with the
patient?
PB: No. Well . . . hardly ever—as the line from H.M.S. Pinafore goes,
“He’s hardly ever sick at sea.”
RL: Hah! And it almost seems that there is a joy in the failure, because you
learn from the failures.
326 DON GREIF, Ph.D. & RUTH LIVINGSTON, Ph.D.
What I did know, even at the time, was that these people were not
only smart, they were honest; they said what they believed and let me
do with it what I would. And that was more important than I could put
into words. I really had a tremendous amount of freedom to go which-
ever way I wanted to go despite the fact that there were many people
who had the authority to say “no you can’t write this, you can’t say this,
we won’t publish it.” Nobody ever did that with me.
RL: That reminds me of your dialogue with Max Cavitch in which you
shared the memory about the English professor. . . .
PB: Right—“we don’t do those kinds of things here.”
DG: That was an English professor in college?
PB: Graduate school at NYU. I was going for a doctorate in English. I
made the mistake of taking the liberty to translate an assignment to
write about Henry IV, Part 1, as okay to write about it any way I
wanted. So I wrote about Prince Hal’s personality. The attack that was
unleashed on me was described in the last chapter of my book, Shadow
of the Tsunami and the Growth of the Relational Mind (2011), but I first
revealed it in my response to Max Cavitch’s review of Awakening the
Dreamer (2006). Max provided an antidote to the residue of the early
trauma that I didn’t even know was still there. I hadn’t realized the
extent to which I was still determined to challenge any authority, imag-
ined or otherwise, that impeded my right to write in my own way and
I, without realizing it, took it out on Emily Dickinson. Cavitch happens
to be an authority, an expert on Dickinson, so he saw that when I used
one of her Life of the Poet poems (Dickinson, 1863/1960) as an epi-
graph to a chapter, I had made prose out of it so it would be easier for
my readers to understand it. I also took out the dashes, which were her
trademark . . . not only a trademark, but her own challenge to the liter-
ary establishment. Dickinson decided that she was going to change
what was accepted procedure, and the use of dashes was probably her
signature act of defiance. Years later, people admired her for that rebel-
liousness. Cavitch pointed this out and devoted part of his review
(2007) of the book to discussing how this felt like an enactment be-
tween Dickinson and me of the right to not accept trauma lying down.
DG: This is the way you do things.
PB: Yeah. When I can. But I do it more knowingly these days.
328 DON GREIF, Ph.D. & RUTH LIVINGSTON, Ph.D.
ties of their own, and speak and publish in their own voices—which
means a lot to me because something great has been happening in our
work together that has contributed to their developing without their
becoming rubber stamps of me. And at the same time, I have been
developing because of them.
RL: That’s quite the legacy.
PB: Yeah.
With me, they might as well have been different patients! As soon as
we started to work interpersonally, the way I was with them made
them open themselves up to experiencing something where they felt
different. It wasn’t that they could just talk about themselves differ-
ently, but that they could be different. And, boy, were they! When I first
knew my colleague, if I had felt more burdened by the intensity of
how I work, I would have yearned to have patients like those I imag-
ined she had, but when I got these two referrals I didn’t feel “Oh, they
will be perfect for me.” It wasn’t till we had worked together for a bit
that I began to feel they were “perfect” for me. She, of course, felt that
they were perfect for her before they ever found me. There you go.
DG: We “create” patients in a real way; we allow stuff to emerge by virtue
of who and how we are.
PB: And I’m convinced that our patients know this, and give us clues all
the time if we’re closing ourselves off to certain things that we don’t
want to go near. They know it; they give us lots of clues.
DG: Sounds like with this former therapist they kept their problems dis-
crete and bounded. You created new problems!
PB: I did. For both of us!
DG: Reminds me of something Freud said: If you’re not neurotic before
you’re in analysis, you’ll become neurotic when you get in touch with
your complexity.
PB: Freud said that? That’s great—I never heard it before.
at least say that the range covers most schools of thought. There is a
red thread running through them that is more personal than concep-
tual, and I guess it is my way of saying that I feel they are talking di-
rectly to me and teaching me something—often something that even
when I had believed I already knew it, I then discovered what I had
been missing.
RL: How do you find the time to read all that you read?
PB: Actually, I feel I don’t read enough, so what I do read, I read not
because I have to, but because I really want to.
DG: You feel you don’t read enough analytic material?
PB: Yeah. But, a lot of what I do read isn’t psychoanalytic: it’s literature,
poetry.
DG: How do you think that affects you and your work?
PB: It makes it more exciting to me because I feel like what I’m doing as
a psychoanalytic author and thinker isn’t separate from what’s impor-
tant in creative self-expression to the larger world of people who illu-
minate the same kinds of things I write about psychoanalytically, but
do it in a way that is beyond anything I could imagine before I read it.
So I’m privileged to enter that world, allowed to see what it connects
to in me and then borrow what I experience to enrich my own self-
expression.
DG: Any particular authors or poets who have had a profound impact?
PB: Yes, one of them I mentioned already: Emily Dickinson. Then there’s
Robert Frost, Randall Jarrell, and Fernando Pessoa.
RL: Could you speak a bit about your writing process?
PB: You really want me to talk about this?
RL: Yes, I think our readers would be interested!
PB: Writing has become to me synchronous with everything else that I
do. That is, I can’t write if I have to think about what I’m writing while
I’m writing. That may sound nuts, but experientially it’s not nuts: it
actually facilitates writing. It’s something like this: Let’s say I am given
a topic to write a paper about because I’ve been asked to present at a
conference. I sit down with the topic in mind and I feel, “I don’t know
336 DON GREIF, Ph.D. & RUTH LIVINGSTON, Ph.D.
what to say about this. Sooner or later a voice in me says: “So?” I an-
swer, “I have no ideas.” The voice says, “So think about it!” But I just
sit there. Nothing comes into my mind. Then the strange part happens.
Seemingly unbidden, I start writing. And I keep writing until it starts to
feel forced. So I stop. Then I go have something to eat, sharpen some
pencils or something equally important (I write on a computer, but
sharpening pencils continues to help me even though I don’t need
them!). Then I come back to the computer and I sit down, and I don’t
reread what I’ve written. I just look at the topic again, and something
else comes to me unbidden that may have nothing to do with what I’ve
just written. So I do the same thing (write, put aside, etc.). I do this as
frequently as I can before getting tired and then I put it away and come
back to it another day and do some more. Finally, I end up with a lot
of “stuff” and I haven’t the slightest idea how—or even if it will—fit
together or what the topic is going to be when I try to fit it together. I’d
like it to have something to do with the topic I was assigned to write
about, but I’m not sure it will. So, then I start to read until something
moves me emotionally (something that I’ve written), and I say, “Oh, oh
yeah. I like this; I wonder what it would be like if I started with this.”
This feels alive. So, then, I start with that and then I go through the
entire text again and, behold, there is something that actually connects
to the first part that I didn’t realize had any relevance to it. I may need
a sentence or a bridging paragraph that joins them, but I’m on my way.
And as I keep doing this, little by little, I get a feeling that I know what
I’m writing about: There actually is a topic. It may not be quite the
topic that I was assigned to write about, but it’s close enough. And this
is more or less how it goes.
DG: So it’s relying on your subjective self-state at the moment?
PB: Yeah, and doing it this way feels more and more natural as a process
because what I write about is a perspective that I’ve lived with as it has
evolved for 30 years. So I have no trouble thinking about it, but I do
have trouble if some part of me says “THINK about it.” In a supervision
group, for example, if someone is asking me a question about “what
are my ideas,” I first have nothing to say and yet, before long, I find
myself talking for half an hour about the implications of my thinking.
Often, I wish I had a tape of that session because I have no doubt that
I was saying things that I hadn’t said before. When the group ends, I’ll
INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP BROMBERG 337
patient and analyst but between one’s own self-states, at least tempo-
rarily. Bringing the here-and-now shame into the open is inherently a
“messy” process. It is not easy on an analyst’s professional stability, but
if analyst and patient are able to live with it and stay authentically en-
gaged through the many repetitions of the same mess, and the analyst
does not try to restabilize himself by invoking the concept of “intrac-
table transference resistance,” something can indeed be done.
I also address an issue that I feel is not given enough discussion in
the literature; namely, what do we conceptualize taking place inside
the patient as treatment progresses? How we answer this question will
reflect our view of what constitutes wholeness and optimal mental
functioning. And that answer will, in turn, inform how we believe heal-
ing takes place. I contend that optimal mental functioning consists in
our being able to access disparate self-states enough to experience in-
ternal conflict, and that the nonlinear, repetitive process that takes
place in analytic treatment is the fundamental relational context for
increasing internal communication between these states through what
I call “the negotiation of otherness.”
In my writing I try to alert analysts to how difficult this process can
be for the therapist and the patient as they necessarily explore the
darker, “not-me” recesses of their own personalities.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PAPER? WHY?
PB: There are two. The first is not actually a paper but the final two chap-
ters in a book published in 1971 by Harry Guntrip, titled Psychoanalytic
Theory, Therapy, and the Self. It was written during and immediately
following Guntrip’s visit to the White Institute in 1968. These two chap-
ters are, to me, Guntrip’s legacy. The first is titled “The Schizoid Prob-
lem,” which is followed by the concluding chapter titled “Psychoanaly-
sis and Psychotherapy.” I consider this his legacy, notwithstanding the
fact that what is typically seen as his magnum opus is a book published
three years earlier, in 1968, Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and
the Self, which covers much of the same ground. The 1971 book, a slim-
mer volume because he eliminated everything except what he believes
in, speaks straight from the shoulder. In the pantheon of object rela-
tions theorists, Guntrip’s work has been largely overshadowed by Fair-
bairn and Winnicott, and his thinking has often been characterized as
“derivative” of theirs. It’s a bad rap, which I believe is based partly on
his earlier, 1961 book, Personality Structure and Human Interaction, in
340 DON GREIF, Ph.D. & RUTH LIVINGSTON, Ph.D.
which only the title conveyed what he truly believed in. The contents
were basically a rehash of analytic history that paid homage to Fair-
bairn, but it is to his credit that he did smuggle in a few pages about
Sullivan. His 1971 book corrected all that. He repudiated the value of
the concept of technique and interpretations based on theory. It was all
about relationship. But I think that even then, what got to me the most
was his understanding of schizoid processes, the development of self-
other “wholeness” and his feel for the inner world. It truly shaped the
trajectory of my thinking from then on. It first gave me permission to
think about Sullivan and write about Sullivan in a new way that in-
cluded the inner world as well as what went on between people in a
more operational sense. I suspect that my writing during the late 70s
and early 80s was partly fueled by that permission. I’m talking particu-
larly about my three articles, on Regression (1979a), Consensual Valida-
tion (1980b), and Empathy, Anxiety, and Reality (1980a).
My second favorite is in fact a paper, and a strange one. It was writ-
ten by Hellmuth Kaiser and is titled “Emergency” (1962). Kaiser is
known best for his later work when he moved to the United States and
was at Menninger for a while, and then in private practice in Hartford,
Connecticut. He is not very well known to many contemporary ana-
lysts but had a great influence on his peers, especially those at Austen
Riggs. It was his final paper and was written in 1961 and published first
in 1962 in the journal Psychiatry. Kaiser died immediately thereafter,
and the paper was published posthumously, in 1965, in a book of his
collected papers titled Effective Psychotherapy. It is an allegory in the
form of a play in which one therapist, pretending to be a patient, goes
to treat another (depressed) therapist at the behest of the depressed
therapist’s wife, doing this because her husband refuses to have treat-
ment. Kaiser, in this allegory, is demonstrating his belief that in therapy
the process of communication should inherently have a beneficial ef-
fect on both partners. It is considered by some to be Kaiser’s most
powerful critique of what he felt was wrong with the psychoanalytic
movement—including its adherence to the interpretation of content,
the use of free association, and the application of technique.
But the answer to why this is one of my two favorite papers is not a
conceptual one. I read it just before I began my psychoanalytic train-
ing, so I had not yet thought about what was right with psychoanalysis,
much less what was wrong with it. I think I loved Kaiser because he
made me feel: “If a psychoanalyst can write a paper like this, then I am
INTERVIEW WITH PHILIP BROMBERG 341
going into the right field.” I didn’t care whether I could judge if his
viewpoint was accurate. It was his freedom to write the way he wanted
to write that left an indelible impression.
PB: Hah! “Here we go again.”
DG: “No worries about ‘This is not what we do here.’”
PB: No! I discovered Kaiser through a now deceased colleague of mine.
I don’t know if you knew him, Jean Schimek. We were at Downstate
Medical Center together for a very brief period of time and Jean was at
Riggs for a while and knew Kaiser. Anyway, I just thought I’d mention
that.
DG: Just to go back to the Kaiser paper: it certainly resonates with Searles
(1975/1979) and Hoffman (1983), you know, “The patient as inter-
preter of the analyst’s experience.”
PB: Absolutely, but it goes beyond it. It’s that the therapist literally grows
as a person through the relationship.
RL: So when you read that paper it really rocked your world.
PB: It really did. Yeah. And Jean Schimek, a committed Freudian, loved
this guy too. He, like Kaiser, was someone who wanted to go his own
way—and did. I’m glad to be talking about Jean because it allows me
to remember our time together at Downstate, and how much I liked
him.
DG: It makes me wonder. I would think plenty of Freudians—Freud him-
self—may have been profoundly personally affected and transformed
by patients, but they don’t talk about it, write about it.
PB: Ahhhh! I have a feeling you are about to ask me where I stand with
regard to Freud!
RL: So let’s go there.
DG: You know, your model could be very applicable to the evolution of
psychoanalytic theory because, if we think about the different schools
of thought as different self-states or analogous to them, and we think
of them as dissociated, in the evolution we could see them coming
more together and overcoming the dissociations so that perhaps there’s
more conflict and eventually maybe more acceptance of these different
theoretical ideas.
PB: Yes! I never thought about that before. Absolutely! But the evolution
would take place only if each school of thought is able to keep its
separate identity while the evolution is happening. The evolution is a
. . . it’s what I call “staying the same while changing.” Each school of
thought has to remain fundamentally true to itself in order to change.
As with a patient, nobody is ever really able say, “Oh I know the mo-
ment I changed.” In retrospect a patient can say “I was sort of different
back then.” The change process is itself invisible because as long as you
and your patient are doing the work in the right way, a patient is still
feeling like the same person. Likewise, I think each school of thought
has to feel like the same school of thought in order to more freely ac-
cept otherness.
RL: While being open to…
PB: While being open to evolving.
DG: Mm-hmm. If Freud were to read your work, if you were to supervise
Freud, he might very well come to see that his subjectivity has been
really important to him, in an implicit, unacknowledged way, so he
might then have a lot more appreciation of self-states, dissociation, and
the self-state psychologist within himself.
PB: Absolutely. That question you asked about what would it be like to
supervise Freud, I loved that, because when I said what I’d be doing,
it wasn’t that I’d be toying with him to make him feel something. I’d
really be doing what I described because I would be so thrilled to have
an opportunity to be learning from him—oh, that’s the Hellmuth Kaiser
situation. I would want to hear what this man had to say in his own
terms because I so appreciate who he is in his own terms, and so my
telling him how I see things differently, and why, would be in the con-
text of valuing him as he is now, and in the course of it I’d want him
to be able to accept listening to me in my terms. If he was playing a
tape of himself with a patient, I would try to help him listen to what
352 DON GREIF, Ph.D. & RUTH LIVINGSTON, Ph.D.
Selected Bibliography