Memoir of a Psychoanalyst’s Wife

By Jane Linker Schwartz

Much has been written about the lives of male physician psychoanalysts, but little has been recorded about their wives and families who travel with them through their long medical training experience. In Memoir of a Psychoanalyst’s Wife, author Jane Linker Schwartz offers a look at her life and how psychoanalysis helped shape her during the twentieth century.

As a nonagenarian and part-time psychotherapist, her long life reaches back to 1925. Schwartz lived through the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the aftermath of those turbulent years. During the 1960s and 1970s, she was a young, white, middle-class American woman married to a psychiatrist-psychoanalyst. Her collected memories throughout the years are mixed with a strong flavor of the history of American psychoanalysis.

While sharing Schwartz’ personal story, this memoir also chronicles the changes that took place in the twentieth century when the Women’s Movement questioned the role of the traditional wife and mother as it was affected by professional ambitions outside the home. It examines competition between married partners regarding professional status and whose work was more important. It also traces changes in women’s behavior toward home responsibilities and children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532059704

Jane Linker Schwartz

Jane Linker Schwartz is a nurse and social worker who spent her professional life as a professor, writer, and psychotherapist. She has co-authored two other books, Vulnerable Infants- a Psychological Dilemma and The Psychodynamics of Patient Care: A Life Cycle Approach. Schwartz has also received two awards for previous publications with her material used widely in schools of nursing and social work in universities across America.

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Copyright © 2018 Jane Linker Schwartz.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-5969-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-5970-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018912233

iUniverse rev. date:   11/09/2018

Also by Jane Linker Schwartz

The Psychodynamics of Patient Care: A life Cycle Approach

Co-Authored by Lawrence H. Schwartz, M.D.

Vulnerable Infants – A Psychosocial Dilemma

To th

e memory of Marco DeFunis (1942-2002), my friend and my attorney, whose lifelong pursuit of justice was a magnificent obsession.

For Dr. Ellen Colburn who made these last forty years memorable and joyful.

CONTENTS

Chapter One    To Be Or Not To Be

Chapter Two    The Collision with the Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute

Chapter Three    The Breakup and Divorce Trial

Chapter Four    The Psychoanalyst and the Pig’s Head

Chapter Five    To Win and Not To Win

Chapter Six    Another Round through the Courts

Chapter Seven    The Third Act

CHAPTER ONE

TO BE OR NOT TO BE

In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Psychoanalysis is one part of the twentieth century that shaped my life. I lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the aftermath of those turbulent years. During the 1960s and 1970s, I was a young, white, middle class American woman married to a psychiatrist-psychoanalyst. I quietly observed the struggles of African-American masses as they battled for their civil rights. As a detached spectator, I didn’t appreciate that this important movement had many of the same issues that the first wave of feminists had in 1848. Civil rights reforms and the new women’s movement of the 1960s changed me from an unaffected observer to an involved participant. During my marriage in the 1970s, my professional ambitions collided with my civil rights and position as a psychoanalyst’s wife. This became a significant crisis and major life change for me when I was fifty years old.

As a nonagenarian and part-time psychotherapist, my long life reaches back to 1925, the beginning of the second quarter of the twentieth century. My collected memories over many years are mixed with a strong flavor of the history of American psychoanalysis. They include the heyday of this movement early in the 1950s through the late 1980s. This remembrance of my life is a small speck of what is now psychiatric and psychoanalytic history. Charles Dickens in his observations from the nineteenth century might also characterize the twentieth century as another time in history where there were so many signs of hope, coupled with despair.

Much has been written about the lives of male physician psychoanalysts but little has been recorded about their wives and families who travel with them through their long medical training experience. My memoir is mostly about my life in Seattle, Washington as a psychoanalyst’s wife, as well as my professional experience as a psychiatric nurse and a clinical social worker. This story is about a time when I, a non-physician, wished to study psychiatry and psychoanalysis in depth. I hoped to apply some of Freud’s concepts to my own professional interests. While I was neither a physician nor a psychiatrist, I had a long lasting fascination with the psychoanalytic view of the human mind and life cycle. I also pondered about the application of psychoanalytic concepts to issues in contemporary American culture.

Until the twentieth century, women writers were largely anonymous. They had little opportunity for higher education or ability to write about their experiences. The road for equality has not been easy for American women. I was fortunate to have lived in one of the best centuries for change, but more changes still seem necessary. Younger generations, however, continue to benefit from foundations built by earlier American women.

The twentieth century gave American women the greatest number of positive changes. The twenty-first century has continued to open tightly closed doors in education, commerce and religion. Now, more women than men are being educated in our universities. Today women are also living longer and feeling healthier and no longer experience menopause as a dull, depressing slip into aging.

I was fifty years old in 1975, when during my menopause I naively wondered what university would have me as a doctoral candidate. During the first half of the twentieth century women were considered second-class citizens. Home life, family and motherhood were viewed as highest areas of achievement. It was assumed that most women wanted to marry and raise children. Women with outstanding professions were considered unusual and frequently viewed with question. Women for centuries were accustomed to the traditional belief that everyone else’s needs should come first.

The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead concluded that one should, never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. My story is influenced by the experience of a few earlier progressive women, my emerging curiosity about psychoanalysis, my family background and my struggle for independence.

Toward the end of the 20th century, the Women’s Rights Movement celebrated the 150th anniversary. It was just one of the many social movements celebrated that would change my existence as well as my professional future. The women’s movement is an example of my father’s humorous comment about the changes in young women’s lives. He said, "You can’t keep ’em on the farm after they’ve seen Pair-ee."

In 1894, my grandparents joined 38 million other Europeans who came to the United States. In the 1820s and 1924, these immigrants were seeking the freedom and opportunities that only America could offer them. My mother, Sadie Friedman, came here as an infant from Eastern Europe and my father, Sydney Linker, was born in upstate New York. I came from a middle-class Reform Jewish background, born of a mother from a transplanted Austrian-Hungarian home, obsessed with her need to become thoroughly Americanized.

There are many different kinds of Jews and a large variety of ways of practicing Judaism. My parents were very much influenced by the Reform Jewish movement in America. This method of interpreting the Jewish religion was especially popular among many American Jews of German descent. My parents spoke neither Hebrew nor Yiddish and did not observe many Jewish rituals. They did however, have a strong commitment to the Jewish people in America and around the world, especially in Israel. They simply felt that the Reform Judaism updated their religious belief in one God. While my parents had many differences in their long and troublesome marriage, they were together in their respect and affection for our religion.

My parents left upstate New York in the 1920s during the Florida real estate boom to seek a new life away from their families. As a young married couple they proudly drove their new Model T Ford down the northeast coast, joining thousands of other post-World War I troopers, eager to enjoy a warm and welcoming climate. They used their Tin Lizzie to explore much of Florida with their new black automobile and finally settled in Tampa.

I was born in our small two bedroom bungalow in September 1925, long before air-conditioning. My mother was assisted by her physician who made home deliveries. In those days, it was usual to be born at home, and later in life to die at home. I was the younger of two daughters. My sister, Charlotte, was three years older than I and ill with severe ulcerative colitis during most of her childhood. She spent most of her daytime inside reading, while resting on our living room couch. My early life was spent outdoors swimming, climbing trees, playing tennis and enjoying the priceless gift of good health. I rarely spent daytime inside our home because it sometimes seemed to be an infirmary, and I found it too depressing. My sister and I shared our large double bed during most of my early childhood. Her illness was especially difficult for me. Her ulcerative colitis also included the complication of large, weeping ulcers on her arms and legs. Watching my mother’s frequent bandaging of these open sores greatly affected me during my early childhood. My mother, who wanted to be a physician like her favorite uncle, functioned primarily as a nurse caring for my sister, who was constantly ill.

My father was a gentle, kind and courageous man. He emerged from the First World War understanding that some veterans would suffer lifelong mental and physical injuries. The trauma he witnessed during his time in war made him sensitive to the needs of others. Similar to today’s veterans, he felt a special closeness for the rest of his life to his buddies. He emphasized to me the importance of being a good soldier. Despite his life-long illness with diabetes he never complained. He taught me that each of us are like foot soldiers struggling to make our lives and ideas meaningful and useful.

Both parents taught me that life is not always fair. My father had developed diabetes shortly before I was born. My mother was devastated at the thought of being a single mother, and considered aborting me. For centuries, patients often died within months after contracting the disease. My father was initially faced with information that he, too, was expected to die within a short span of time after his diagnosis. My father was one of the first people treated with insulin, discovered in the early 1920s by Doctors Banting and Best. Diabetes today is a very different disease than it was. Despite the discovery of insulin, my father had many various insulin reactions. His serious diabetes often caused an inability to determine the right dosage. This continues today with many new drugs, which clinically have to be tested to determine the proper amount for patients. I learned from him how to cope with a serious illness, and the importance of hope.

My father’s numerous health problems evolving from the First World War later caused him to become permanently disabled. He volunteered in veterans’ organizations, often typing letters for fellow veterans, much like a modern social worker. Many of the men he assisted were disabled for years after World War I ceased, but their problems from the war often continued for an unending time. Seeing those veterans, coupled with my sister’s severe ulcerative colitis, gave me an introduction to the overall experience of sick people and the impact on their families.

Unfortunately, the real estate boom of Florida ended, and the country entered into the years of the Great Depression during the 1930s. My birth was the last really joyous occasion in my parents’ marriage during these years. Growing up, my parents taught me to bear the courage of my convictions even in the face of volatile situations. My mother’s Hungarian blood, mixed with Yankee independence, sometimes made her seem contentious and unbending. Both parents taught me the responsibility for helping those less fortunate. I also learned that, everybody’s got something.

The Ku Klux Klan was part of the tapestry of Florida which was also touted as a tourist paradise. The Klan held a strong-hold in Florida for much of the twentieth century. My parents were especially concerned when one of the most notorious Klan incidents happened near us in Tampa in 1937. I was only twelve years old, but I still remember hearing the horror story about Joseph Shoemaker, a labor organizer who was flogged, castrated, tarred and feathered by the Klan. Even as a child, I read the newspapers and understood the nature of the Klan. Shoemaker died of his injuries and nine of the Klansmen were all freed for his murder. I learned early that sometimes injustice prevails.

In spite of Mr. Shoemaker’s fate, neither my parents nor I experienced much overt antisemitism during these years. Unfortunately one of my early childhood memories was of a classmate, a boy who harassed me one day as I was starting to bicycle home. He was a bully but had never bothered me before. In fact, as a little girl I had felt he found me attractive. One day, he called me, a little dirty Jew, and I was horrified. How could he see me in my clean, starched dress and make this painful comment? He also put a thumb-tack in my bicycle tire as he left, laughing. I ran home to my mother who was furious. She had no patience for antisemitism and had no fear of bullies. She jumped in our car, screeching the breaks on our beach sand drive way as she drove alone to confront his parents.

The boy’s father was a big, tall trucker who drove large moving vans. My mother discussed the matter with him and the boy never bothered me again. The memory of this was awakened fifty years later when I returned to Florida for a high school reunion. I had not seen him during all these years. Each of us were asked to bring pictures from our past and on the table was a picture of him from the Second World War, serving as a sailor in the United States Navy. For the first time in my life, I forgave him. I realized that the memory could be settled by thinking of his service to the country. That day I saw him as a grown man, older and hopefully wiser. I also learned from my mother not to tolerate bullies.

If there were a travel gene in my DNA, I must have inherited it from my