ZINBUN No. 47 2016
Varia
Teaching the History of Psychiatry in the 1950s:
Henri Ellenberger’s Lectures at
the Menninger Foundation
Emmanuel Delille
Summary: After beginning his historical work in Switzerland in the 1950s and then continuing it in
the United States at the Menninger Foundation, Henri Ellenberger (1905–1993) became the leading
historian of “dynamic psychiatry”. This expression commonly denotes mental medicine that draws
from psychotherapeutic practices and psychological theories to improve our understanding of mental
diseases and to cure them. Although still used today, usually in juxtaposition to 19th century alienism
or to biological psychiatry, the origin and meaning of this expression are unclear. An unpublished
lecture (1956) by Ellenberger on this subject, accompanied by an explanatory introduction, is reproduced
here to shed light on Ellenberger’s interpretation of that term. This article additionally aims to draw
certain parallels and distinctions between Ellenberger, Michel Foucault and George Devereux’s
teaching in the 1950s. Considering that the history of psychiatry is now a well-established speciality
in the academic world, Ellenberger’s lecture is also an original document which enables us to trace the
professionalization of psychiatric historiography as an academic discipline back to its beginnings after
World War II.
Keywords: Devereux, Ellenberger, History, Menninger, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis
Emmanuel Delille (PhD) is Associate Researcher at the CAPHES (Centre d’Archives de
Philosophie, d’Histoire et d’Édition des Sciences, ENS-Paris), at the Centre Marc Bloch
(Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) and at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Sciences
(Department 3: Artefacts, Action, and Knowledge; Berlin). E-mail: edelille@ens.fr
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Introduction: Michel Foucault, Henri Ellenberger and the history of psychiatry
in the 1950s
The most popular work about the history of psychiatry is still, in human and social
sciences, the Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (in English: Madness and Civilization)1,
published more than half a century ago by French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984).
Yet other essays exist which have known international success in the past, including Henri
Ellenberger’s (1905–1993) book The Discovery of the Unconscious. The History and Evolution
of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970)2. The author was a physician, trained in France, who felt in love
with the methods of clinical psychology and the history of psychiatry in Switzerland3 in the
1950s—like Foucault—before starting his academic career in North America. Fortunately,
these two authors’ works have been translated in several languages across the world including Japanese thanks to Professor Nakai Hisao (Nagoya, then Kobe) and Professor Kimura Bin
(Kyoto)4. However, Ellenberger’s works, sadly, have had little impact in the humanities, while
Foucault still enjoys a considerable following. But few today know that he was an attentive
reader of the irst historical works of Ellenberger in Switzerland.
Since Ellenberger and Foucault’s projects in the ield of history of psychiatry were contemporaneous, I have chosen to present some archival material which document Ellenberger’s
irst teachings at the Menninger School of Psychiatry (Topeka, Kansas) in 1956. His move
to America (1953) represented a turning point in Ellenberger’s career. From this moment on
he devoted himself entirely to research on the history of dynamic psychiatry. Ellenberger
included under this term the mental medicine which draws inspiration from psychotherapeutic practices and conceptions of the psychological unconscious5 to improve the understanding of mental diseases and cure them. The origin and meaning of this expression are,
however, unclear, although it is still used today to distinguish a psychiatric tradition markedly
different from 19th century alienism or to biological psychiatry.
1
2
3
4
5
Foucault, M. (1972). L’histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (irst edition 1961). Paris: Gallimard.
Ellenberger, H. (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious. The History and Evolution of Dynamic
Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.
See: Delille, E. (forthcoming). “Henri Ellenberger in Schaffhausen (1943–1953): Die Geschichte der
dynamischen Psychiatrie als Exilliteratur”. In: 125 Jahre Psychiatrische Klinik Breitenau (Jörg
Püschel dir.). Schaffhausen: Schaffhauser Beiträge zur Geschichte.
エレンベルガー，アンリ／ 木 村 敏 他 訳『 無 意 識の発 見 』
（ 上・下 ），弘 文 堂 ，東 京 ，1980
(Ellenberger, Henri, translation by Kimura Bin et al., Muishiki no hakken (2 volumes). Tokyo:
Kôbundô). エランベルジェ，
アンリ／中井久夫編訳『エランベルジェ著作集』
1-3，
みすず書房，
東京，1999–2000 (Ellenberger, Henri, translation by Nakai Hisao, Ellenberger Chosaku-shû (3
volumes). Tokyo: Misuzu-shobô).
See: Gauchet, M. (1999). L’inconscient cérébral. Paris: Seuil.
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TEACHING THE HISTORY OF PSYCHIATRY IN THE 1950S
To recreate the context in which Ellenberger started to teach the history of dynamic
psychiatry, I will not only draw parallels and make distinctions between the intellectual
journeys of Ellenberger and Foucault in the 1950s but also include other professors of the
Menninger Foundation. This is not the place to retrace the entire history of this institution,
but I would like to remind the reader that it combined the administration of two hospitals—
the Winter Veterans Administration Hospital and the Topeka State Hospital—as well as two
research and teaching facilities, the Menninger School of Psychiatry and the Topeka Institute
for Psychoanalysis, which developed considerably in the 1940s and 1950s—under the authority of the Menninger family. Ellenberger’s lecture, simply entitled “Dynamic Psychiatry: An
Introduction”6, is taken from the archives of the University of Montreal. Montreal possesses
archives, although the main Ellenberger archives are in France, at the Sainte Anne Hospital
in Paris7. Both archive groups keep the copies of the six volumes of typewritten documents
that form the History of Dynamic Psychiatry8, which compile lectures, notes and essays that
were the foundation of the book Ellenberger published in 1970. The document I will present
here is the one Ellenberger chose to place at the beginning of the irst volume of a series of
44 lectures (see Table 1). An American research grant application dating back to 1961 also
shows us Ellenberger’s ambition to carry out investigations in Europe in 1962 and 1963:
France (Paris), Switzerland (Geneva, Bern, Zurich, Basel, and Aarau), Germany (Munich,
Weinsberg) and Austria (Vienna).
The irst lecture is didactic and clearly aims to spark the medical students’ interest in the
history of this discipline, starting from their own practice as young psychiatrists in training.
The whole of Ellenberger’s teaching shows that he never intended to write an apology of
Sigmund Freud’s genius but instead a general history of the theories of psychiatry and of
the psychotherapeutic practices from the second half of the eighteenth century to the Second
World War. The introductory lecture takes Jean-Martin Charcot’s “dynamic” conception of
nervous diseases in the nineteenth century as a starting point. Finally, in his grant application (1961), just like in his lectures in Topeka, Ellenberger mentions as the main schools of
dynamic psychiatry those of Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Carl G. Jung, and
the school of Existential Analysis. As we well know, these four pioneers can also be found
in the book published in 1970. However, the existential movement in post-war Switzerland
is the one that Foucault and Ellenberger showed the most interest in. But there is one other
signiicant difference in the archive document presented here: Adolf Meyer, a Swiss-born
6
7
8
Université de Montréal, University Archives, 7151. Text prepared by Emmanuel Delille.
Centre de Documentation Henri Ellenberger, Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne, Paris.
Ellenberger, H. [undated]. History of Dynamic Psychiatry, six bound volumes. Université de
Montréal, University Archives, 7151 and 7152. As the books are not identical, I should specify that
I consulted those of Montreal.
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doctor whose inluence on American psychiatry has been considerable, is also mentioned as
a central actor in Ellenberger’s lecture. But Meyer’s importance receded into the background
of historical analysis when Ellenberger left the United States for Canada. In fact, it is important to take into account Ellenberger’s biography as his career is closely linked to his private
life and punctuated with “scientiic migrations”.
Biographical elements and deinitions of “Dynamic Psychiatry”
According to biographer Andrée Yanacopoulo9, Ellenberger had ive different nationalities during his life: British (British Born), French, Swiss, American and Canadian. He was born
in 1905 in Nalolo in present-day Zambia within a family of protestant missionaries of Swiss
and French origin. After medical studies in France, he became a psychiatrist and worked
successively in western France (Poitiers), in Schaffhausen (Switzerland), Topeka (Kansas) and
in Montreal (Canada) where he started his academic career in 1959. He worked as an associate professor at McGill University before being appointed at the University of Montreal as a
professor, where he taught criminology in the social science department in 1962.
Unlike Foucault, Ellenberger was a trained physician, but both men developed a fascination for psychological tests and existential analysis in the 1940s and 1950s before taking a step back and adopting historical methods to analyse psychological knowledge. The
Ellenberger and Foucault families were acquainted—without developing a close relationship—as Ellenberger irst worked as a doctor specialized in nervous diseases in Poitiers,
where Foucault’s father worked as a surgeon. The fact that Foucault’s critical view, as the
son of a doctor, would be inluenced by his father’s profession is an element of his biography
which is rarely mentioned10 and yet cannot be overlooked.
During the war, Ellenberger led France11 for Switzerland, the country of his ancestors,
where he eventually worked as a chief physician in the Breitenau asylum in Schaffhausen.
This small county is located near Zurich, not far from Kreuzligen and Münsterlingen where
psychiatrists Ludwig Binswanger and Roland Kuhn respectively worked. The work of
these two physicians was very important for Foucault’s irst studies on psychology. Here
again, one can trace back a convergence: as soon as 1947, well before Foucault (who came to
Münsterlingen in 1954), Ellenberger started to visit Roland Kuhn—already well known for
his scientiic activities, irst as a specialist of the Rorschach test and of the phenomenologi9
10
11
Yanacopoulo, A. (2009). Henri F. Ellenberger. Une vie, Montréal: Liber.
See: Foucault, M. (2011). Le beau danger. Entretien avec Claude Bonnefoy, Paris: Éditions EHESS,
p. 42–46.
He obtained French nationality in 1939 but lived under threat of losing it following laws of the
“État français” of Vichy. Another law excluded naturalized doctors from their profession.
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cal approach of psychiatry (Kuhn then became one of the irst to specialize in psychopharmacology). In Switzerland, Ellenberger visited Jacqueline and Georges Verdeaux whom he
certainly met in France at the Sainte-Anne hospital before the war. Jacqueline Verdeaux was
a collaborator of Foucault’s father and the main instigator of Foucault’s interest for psychology and electro-encephalography. Finally, and once again similarly to Foucault, Ellenberger
also participated to a translation project of Ludwig Binswanger in the 1950s, but in English12.
These similarities are not only thematic: Foucault read Ellenberger’s irst historical
studies in Switzerland and probably used them to develop his own lectures in psychology.13
This series of essays, published between 1951 and 1953 in a serial form in the French journal L’Évolution Psychiatrique, bound into a hardback edition in 195414—the same year as
Foucault’s irst work on madness15—can be considered as Ellenberger’s irst work on the
dynamic history of psychiatry, especially as one can ind the relection of his keen interest
in the four “pioneer” igures (Janet, Freud Adler and Jung) he would later place at the core of
his 1970 work. Finally, Ellenberger was a ierce critic of asylum during the years 1951–1953,
well before Foucault, and described a daily life of coninement and rigid rules hindering
the patients’—and the doctors’—well-being, while Foucault developed his criticism of these
institutions much later, as well as a theory of the great coninement (in French: “le grand
renfermement”) which distanced itself from the practice of ordinary psychiatry.
Despite these differences, one can say that neither Ellenberger nor Foucault was an outsider. The archives recently reproduced by Elisabetta Basso and Jean-François Bert16—in
particular the psychological tests conducted by the young Foucault as an assistant psychologist—remind us that to interpret his contribution to the philosophy and the history of psychiatry as a brilliant, external criticism—which stays, to this day, the mainstream version of
Foucauldism—is a misinterpretation that has been overturned.
Scientiic migrations and the development of research at the Menninger Foundation
Ellenberger secured a position at the Menninger Foundation after a journey to the United
States devoted to the observation of the psychotherapeutic techniques of schizophrenic
12
13
14
15
16
See: Binswanger, L. (1954). Le Rêve et l’Existence (translation by Jacqueline Verdeaux, introduction
and annotations by Michel Foucault). Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Ellenberger, H., May, R., Angel, E.
(1958). Existence: a new dimension in psychiatry and psychology. New York: Basic Books.
I warmly thank Elisabetta Basso who advised me on Foucault’s annotations kept at the Bibliothèque
Nationale de France. Fonds Foucault, Box Nr 38 and Box Nr 44B, shelf mark NAF 28730.
Ellenberger, H. (1954). La psychiatrie suisse. Aurillac: Imprimerie Poirier-Bottreau.
Foucault, M. (1954). Maladie mentale et personnalité. Paris: P.U.F.
Bert, J., F., & Basso, E., dir. (2015). Foucault à Münsterlingen. À l’origine de l’Histoire de la folie.
Paris: Éditions EHESS.
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patients.17 His irst stay in Topeka, in October 1952, lasted a month. On the 21th of October18
he presented the results of his study in the form of a conference presentation about the use of
a projective test called the Mosaic Test, created by Margaret Lowenfeld, in a case of advanced
schizophrenia. The conference was a success and Ellenberger was warmly congratulated by
Gardney Murphy,19 the research department’s new director. Murphy and Rudolf Ektein20,
another important member of the teaching team at the Menninger Foundation, approached
Karl Menninger (1893–1990) on behalf of Ellenberger to secure a contract for him. This
offer enabled him to quit his job as a doctor at the Schaffhausen asylum, a work situation he
experienced as an imprisonment. In this way he secured a teaching and research position
in a neuropsychiatric centre of international reputation for the irst time. The Menninger
Foundation was not only one of the main training centres for psychiatrists (residents) after
the war but also an important centre of American psychology and psychiatry. It was unique
in that it welcomed perspectives from the humanities and the social sciences. The Menninger
Foundation had already recruited a number of migrant doctors and therapists who had led
Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. Amongst them was George Devereux (1908–1985)—a
central actor whose career, at the crossroad of psychiatry and social science, we will now
ponder on.
Devereux was an anthropologist of Hungarian origin who was trained at the Ethnology
Institute in Paris during the years 1931–1932 before defending his doctoral thesis entitled
Sexual Life of the Mohave Indians (1935; unpublished doctoral dissertation) in anthropology at Berkeley University, California. Like Ellenberger, but before him, he was directly
recruited by Karl Menninger as a research assistant in 1947. More speciically, Devereux
worked at the Menninger Foundation as a “research analyst,” i.e. as an anthropologist trained
in psychoanalysis (in the United States, the status of licensed psychoanalyst only applied to
physicians). But unlike Ellenberger, he had not yet inished his training as a psychoanalyst
which he pursued in Topeka with Robert Hans Jokl, who was also of Jewish and Hungarian
origin. Moreover, Devereux worked with psychologist David Rapaport—also of Jewish
17
18
19
20
See: Delille, E. (2008). “Un voyage d’observation d’Henri Ellenberger aux États-Unis: Henri
Ellenberger entre psychiatrie transculturelle et héritage janétien (1952)”. In: Psychiatries dans
l’histoire (Jacques Arveiller dir.). Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 85–95. Delille, E. (2006).
“Henri Ellenberger et le Traité de Psychiatrie de l’Encyclopédie Médico-Chirurgicale: une carrière
américaine sous le patronage du groupe de l’Évolution Psychiatrique en collaboration avec Henri
Ey”, Gesnerus, Revue suisse d’histoire de la médecine, 63 (3/4), 259–279.
Letter from Henri Ellenberger to his wife Émilie Ellenberger, le 22 octobre 1952. In: Ellenberger,
H. (1995). Médecine de l’âme. Essais d’histoire de la folie et des guérisons psychiques (Elisabeth
Roudinesco ed.). Paris: Fayard, p. 521.
Ibid.
The two men also exchanged letters from November 1952 to February 1953.
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TEACHING THE HISTORY OF PSYCHIATRY IN THE 1950S
and Hungarian origin—who ran the department of psychology at the Menninger School of
Psychiatry. Rapaport largely contributed to the Menninger Foundation’s scientiic outreach
in the 1940s. Devereux completed his psychoanalytic training at a key moment when the
use and the teaching of psychological tests were at their climax in Topeka, which explains
why the results of one of Rapaport’s collaborator, Robert Holt, have such an important place
within irst Devereux’s study Reality and dream. Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (1951)—
and also why Ellenberger’s irst lecture at the Menninger Foundation (1952) focussed on a test.
Reality and Dream. Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian21 is Devereux’s irst book. It is
based on the transcription of 30 psychoanalytic therapy sessions that Devereux had with
Jimmy Picard (a pseudonym), a Native American from the Blackfoot tribe, who as a World
War II veteran was being treated at the Winter General Hospital. Jimmy Picard suffered from
psychological distress stemming from a number of factors, including familial conlict, relationship problems, overconsumption of alcohol, and cranial trauma incurred during the war.
Devereux presents a few basic aspects of Blackfoot culture, stressing in particular the importance of dreams. The treatment narrative is interwoven with Jimmy Picard’s family history
and the anamnesis of his suffering. Devereux’s theoretical positions in the 40’s are based on
the psychoanalytical interpretation of neurotic symptoms, considering the Freudian theory
as universal. But he tried to avoid psychological reductionism as well.22
Thus, when Ellenberger arrived in Topeka, the Research Department were already developed and clinical psychology had acquired a particular signiicance it did not have before the
war. Amongst the dozens of European psychoanalysts who led Nazi Germany between 1933
and 1945—but especially after the invasion of Austria in 1938—about a dozen specialists,23
essentially physicians, became long-term members of the team alongside young graduates
from the East coast of the United States. By convincing qualiied psychologists from New
York and Harvard to come to the Menninger Foundation and by obtaining federal funds to
develop psychological expertise during the war, David Rapaport managed to build a strong
scientiic team. Amongst the prominent igures of this team, one can mention the names
of Margaret Brenman, Roy Schafer, Sibylle Escalona, and Martin Mayman during the war;
after 1945, Robert Holt, George Klein, Lester Luborsky, Philip Holzman, Herbert Schlesinger,
Milton Wexler, etc. However, the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s there was
a change in the team. While Devereux worked in close relationship to Rapaport and Holt,
21
22
23
Devereux, G. (1951). Reality and Dream. Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian. New York: International
Universities Press.
See: Delille E. (2016). “On the History of Cultural Psychiatry: George Devereux, Henri Ellenberger,
and the Psychological Treatment of Native Americans in the 1950’s”, Transcultural Psychiatry, 53
(3), 392–411.
Friedman, L., J. (1992). The Menninger: The family and the clinic. Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, p. 110.
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Ellenberger was mostly in contact with Murphy and Ekstein. New director Murphy, with the
help of his assistant Robert Wallerstein, ensured the stability and longevity of the Research
Department from 1952 to 1964.
Ellenberger and Murphy had a lot in common: they shared a certain theoretical eclecticism, a protestant education (both Ellenberger’s and Murphy’s fathers were ministers), a
passion for social psychology and projective tests. Quite a few of Rapaport’s collaborators
in the 1940s in Topeka were also Murphy’s former collaborators during his years of teaching
(from 1930 to 1940) at Colombia University and at the City College in New York. These are
important indications to help us understand how Ellenberger developed his teachings on
psychiatric history in the United States in the 1950s in the form of a discussion between the
knowledge he had gained in Switzerland on the history of dynamic psychiatry and the academic culture of the East coast of the United States.
Research Assistant and Lecturer at the Menninger School of Psychiatry
Ellenberger’s main activity, once at Menninger, was teaching and research within the
Department of Education. He was almost not engaged in medical practice as the patients
were mostly cared for by the psychiatrists and psychologists of American nationality. His
lectures on dynamic psychiatry provided an historical introduction to the psychoanalytic
psychiatry which young physicians were trained for at the Menninger School of Psychiatry.
Ellenberger also collaborated with psychiatrist Herbert Klemmer for the supervision and/or
evaluation of students’ work—and probably as a member of the editorial board of the Bulletin
of the Menninger Clinic, the scientiic journal of the Menninger Foundation. He published
at least six historical articles in the Bulletin, including one co-authored with Karl Menninger,
and a number of reviews.24 It was only during his stay at the Menninger Foundation that
Ellenberger could devote himself entirely to teaching and research. Archives give us a good
idea of the content of his lectures. Indeed, it is stated that he was “in charge of the course of
psychiatric treatment (he selected the lecturers25), lecturing on psychiatric syndromes26 and
on the history and development of dynamic psychiatry.” Table 1 shows the programme of
this history course.
24
Ellenberger, H. (1954). “The life and work of Hermann Rorschach (1884–1922)”, Bulletin of
the Menninger Clinic, 18 (5), 173–249. Ellenberger, H. (1955). “A Psychiatrist’s informal tour of
Europe”. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 19 (2), 43–52. Ellenberger, H. (1956). “The ancestry
of dynamic psychotherapy”, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 20 (4), 1956, 201–214. Ellenberger,
H. (1956). “Fechner and Freud”, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 20 (6), 288–299. Ellenberger, H.
(1957). “The unconscious before Freud”, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 21 (1), 3–15. Ellenberger,
H., Menninger, K., Pruyser, P., & Mayman, M. (1958). “The unitary concept of mental illness”,
Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 22 (1), 4–12.
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Table 1: Lectures given at the Menninger School of Psychiatry, Topeka Historical Introduction to
Dynamic Psychiatry, Henri Ellenberger27
Introduction. What is dynamic psychiatry?
22. Freud’s philosophical and biological concepts
I.
23. Freud’s basic psychological concepts
1.
The ancestry of dynamic psychiatry
24. Freud’s cultural theories
2.
Mesmer and animal magnetism
25. Psychoanalysis as a therapeutic technique
26. The psychoanalytic movement
3.
From Mesmer to Janet
4.
Hypnotism
5.
Multiple Personality
6.
III.
27. Psychoanalytic theory of neurosis
Great scientiic and philosophical trends in the 28. Psychoanalytic theory of psychosis
19th Century
29. Psychosomatic medicine
7.
The unconscious before Freud
30. Psychoanalysis and criminology
8.
The dream before Freud
31. Psychoanalysis and infant psychology
9.
Concepts on neurosis and psychosis at the end 32. Psychoanalysis and child psychology
of the 19th Century
33. Psychoanalysis and education
10.
Sexual psychology and sexual pathology 34. Psychoanalysis and sociology
before Freud
35. Psychoanalysis and anthropology
11.
Janet 1. Life, personality, and work of Janet
12.
Janet 2. Janet’s psychotherapy
13.
Adolf Meyer
14.
Freud and his time
36. Psychoanalysis and clinical psychology
IV.
37. The deviants I.
II.
38. The deviants II.
39. Alfred Adler I.
15.
Breuer and Freud’s studies on hysteria
40. Alfred Adler II.
16.
Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams”
41. The Neo-Adlerians
17.
“Depth Psychology”
42. Jung I.
18.
The libido theory
43. Jung II.
19.
Metapsychology
44. Ludwig Binswanger
20.
The Ego
21.
Freud’s concepts of the Primal Father, the
Oedipus Complex, and the Castration Complex
25
26
27
Conclusion
Here is a succinct list of the courses Henri Ellenberger organized and the names of the Professors
from the academic year 1957–58: Art Therapy (Donald Jones), General Principles of Adjunct
Therapy (Dr Tarnower), Role of the Ward Physician in the Treatment of Patient who receives psychotherapy (Dr Modlin), Problems of Psychiatric nursing (Dr Hall), Sedatives, Traquilizers, and
Model Psychoses (Dr Feldman), Electric Schock (Dr Dundon), Insulin Therapy (Dr Targownik),
Music Therapy (Forrest Slaughter), Psychotherapy (Dr Robbins).
One can also ind typewritten lectures at the Centre de Documentation Henri Ellenberger (Paris).
University Archives, Université de Montréal, 7151.
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Ellenberger was the irst to provide such in-depth teaching in history at the Menninger
School of Psychiatry in Topeka—and also certainly one of the irst28 in the United States
lecture on the history of contemporary psychiatry from the end of the 18th century to World
War II. However, it is dificult to measure the impact of this course on the training of Topeka
students. Nevertheless, we know—thanks to biographer Andrée Yanacopoulo—that one of
these young people, Roger Dufresne, was one of Ellenberger’s students before starting his
academic career in Montreal where both men became colleagues.
Ellenberger was not the only professor giving a lecture on humanities and social sciences
at the Menninger School of Psychiatry at the beginning of the 1950s, as Devereux himself
gave a lecture on anthropology and psychoanalysis. Archives which concern these lectures
are available and it would be interesting to compare the presentation lealets of these courses
in order to gain some insight on the nature of the teaching in psychiatry and psychoanalysis
in the 1950s.
From 1947 to 1952, Devereux presented a “Psychiatric and psychoanalytic anthropology
course” or, more simply, “Psychoanalysis and Anthropology,” which was comprised of 12
sessions of two hours each, every two weeks. These were speciically designed for the “analytic
candidates”29 at the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis. Like those at the Menninger School
of Psychiatry, these candidates were young (and mostly male) physicians in training. The
following is a snippet taken from the archives: “The relationship between psychoanalysis
and anthropology. Biological vs. cultural. Cultural factors and the topographic, economic
and dynamic approach. Etiology and symptomatology seen culturally. Cultural factors in
therapy and objectives. Case-conferences.” The Devereux archives also give us an idea of
the range of other courses provided by the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis. Indeed,
one document dating back to 1958 lists the courses given at the end of the 1940s and at the
beginning of the 1950s (see Table 2) when Devereux was completing his analytical training
at Topeka. Even though the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis and the Menninger School
28
29
The Zilboorg’s works were already available in American medical schools, but this kind of literature is based on a very limited methodology. See: Zilboorg, G. (1941). A history of medical psychology. New York: Norton. The Alexander & Selesnick’s History of Psychiatry is published in 1966,
already 10 years after the Ellenberger’s lectures at the Menninger Foundation. See: Alexander,
F., G. & Selesnick, S., T. (1966). The History of Psychiatry. New York: Harper and Row. See also
Mark Micale’s analyse: Micale, M., S. (1994). “Henri F. Ellenberger: The History of Psychiatry as
the History of the Unconscious”. In: Discovering the History of Psychiatry. New York: Oxford
University Press, 116.
Here follows, for information, the composition of the Training Committee of the Topeka
Institute for Psychoanalysis in 1952: Karl A. Menninger, Rudolf Ekstein [Ph.D.], Sylvia Allen,
Otto Fleischmann, Hugh N. Galbraith, Hellmuth Kaiser [Ph.D.], William C. Menninger, Lewis L.
Robbins, Nelly H. C. Tibout. Otto Fleischmann was, during this period, the President of the Topeka
Psychoanalytic Society.
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Table 2: Lectures at the Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis30
Trygve Braatoy
George Devereux
Rudolf Ekstein
Sibylle Escalona
Otto Fleischmann
Jan Frank
Alfred Gross
Frederick Hacker
Louisa Holt
Karl Menninger
David Rapaport
Annie Reich
Ellen Simon
Milton Wexler
Mechanisms of Neuroses and Psychoses
Psychoanalysis and Anthropology
Psychoanalysis and Education; Child Psychology
Learning Theory of Psychoanalysis
Mechanisms of Neuroses and Psychoses; Dream Interpretation
Psychoanalytic Literature; History of Development of Psychoanalysis;
Continuous Case Seminar; Current Contributions to Psychoanalytic Literature;
Psychoanalytic Technique; Divergent Movements in Psychoanalysis
Basis Concepts of Psychoanalysis; Continuous Case Seminar
Relation and Application of Psychoanalysis to Philosophy; Mechanisms of
Neuroses and Psychoses
Relationship of Psychoanalysis to Sociology
Continuous Case Seminar; Psychoanalytic Technique
Scientiic Methodology of Psychoanalysis
Theory and Treatment of Narcissistic Neuroses
Continuous Case Seminar
Learning Theory of Psychoanalysis
of Psychiatry were separate institutes, lecturers often worked in both institutes—and the
patients were also the same.
As one may notice from this list of lectures, Topeka was already providing lecture material on the history of psychoanalysis before Ellenberger’s arrival—but only in the form of a
self-valorising professional narrative conined to the internal history of the Freudian theories and clinical techniques. Ellenberger brought the Menninger Foundation another type of
history based on archives and on a speciic methodology of gathering and cross-checking
information from different sources. This methodological turning point in history became
especially prevalent at the Menninger Foundation from 1954 onwards, when Ellenberger
published a long biographical article31 about psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Hermann
Rorschach (1884–1922) in the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic. The Ellenberger archives
reveal that this historical analysis generated an important exchange of correspondence and
prompted professional recognition of Ellenberger’s professionalism as well as a certain academic exposure in the United States. One direct consequence of this professional recogni30
31
IMEC: DEV 7.10: File which concerns the psychoanalytic training and practice of Devereux at the
Topeka Institute for Psychoanalysis 2/2.
Ellenberger, H. (1954). “The life and work of Hermann Rorschach (1884–1922)”, op. cit.
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tion was the increase of his working hours on the initiative of the Menninger School of
Psychiatry board. Ellenberger was furthermore consulted for the revision of the university
curriculum at Topeka which included a component on the history of medicine (and then on
the history of psychiatry).
The recognition of Ellenberger’s contributions to scholarship was soon relected in the
increasing number of invitations he received to present the results of his historical research
in North American universities, especially in Montreal where he would later pursue his career.
Additionally, Karl Menninger requested his help and the two men developed an increasingly
close collaboration with the aim of writing a book on Menninger’s conceptualization of
mental illness. This project never saw the light in its initial form but some letters testify
that Ellenberger did write at least one chapter32 before leaving the Menninger Foundation in
1958 and that at least one article is the result of this collaboration. Finally, Karl Menninger
directly refers to this common work as well as to Ellenberger’s historical analysis33 in a book
entitled The Vital Balance (1963), probably a reshaping of this project which remained in
draft form in the 1950s.
Conclusion and perspectives: the history of dynamic psychiatry as a literature
of exile
Considering Ellenberger’s career, one can observe that the move from clinical psychiatry
to the history of dynamic psychiatry took place progressively in the 1950s. A series of articles
entitled La Psychiatrie Suisse (1951–53) represents the irst stage of this move. His resettlement in the United States in 1953 and his irst historical article about Hermann Rorschach
published in the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic in 1954 can be considered as the turning
point. At that time, his students were, admittedly, American physicians in training and he
would have to wait until 1962 when he began his position as a professor at the University of
Montreal before he could teach non-medical students in a social science department. But this
also explains why this appropriation of the historical method is progressive during the 1950–
60 decade until the style statement which culminates in The Discovery of the Unconscious.
The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970). Other hints lead us to think that
Ellenberger did not consider himself solely as a physician at the Menninger Foundation and
that his self-identity as an historian was becoming more important: for instance, he chose not
32
33
Entitled “Chapitre 3”, it exists in the form of a detailed plan and manuscript in Henri Ellenberger
archives. The two men also exchanged letters about this project and the unitary concept of mental
illness (Centre de Documentation Henri Ellenberger).
Karl Menninger mentions in particular an article by Henri Ellenberger on Sigmund Freud and
Gustav Fechner (1956) but also his analysis on the history of psychiatric classiications. See the
appendix of the Menninger’s The Vital Balance.
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to participate in one of the Menninger Foundation physicians’ prominent scientiic project
involving the assessment of psychotherapies. This project took the shape of a longitudinal
study (Psychotherapy research project of the Menninger Foundation34) which ran for twenty
years from the beginning of the 1950s to the middle of the 1970s. The main leaders of
this project were David Rapaport35, Stephen A. Appelbaum36, Richard S. Siegal and Irwin
C. Rosen.
Ellenberger left Topeka at the end of the year 1958. He then lived in New York (on
Broadway) from January to June 1959 to work on his project of a history of dynamic psychiatry. Devereux also lived in New York during this time and, as a new psychoanalyst and psychologist, built up a private customer base alongside his job teaching ethnopsychiatry before
moving back to France to pursue an academic career in Paris. Ellenberger also toyed with the
idea of moving to France but he would later settle permanently in Montreal. In Canada, he
published an article in French called “La psychiatrie et son histoire inconnue”37 which is part
of the corpus of historical analysis led at the Menninger Foundation.
Ultimately, one can consider Ellenberger’s life in Topeka as a second exile after his experience in Switzerland. As a profound experience of uprooting and nostalgia, exile is maybe
one of the keys to Ellenberger’s history of dynamic psychiatry. I therefore put forward the
idea that experiencing exile is one of the explanations for Ellenberger’s historically-based
turn in the 1950s. Indeed, one can interpret the history of dynamic psychiatry as the desire
to retrieve the origins of the psychology Ellenberger was taught in France and which he
had tried to ind in Switzerland amongst the Swiss psychoanalysts and psychologists38 to
34
35
36
37
38
The project was supported by a grant of Public Health Service Research Grant from the National
Institute of Mental Health, by the Foundation Fund for Research in Psychiatry, and by the Ford
Foundation.
Rapaport, D., Gill, M., M. & Schaffer, R. (1945–46). Diagnostic psychological testing: The theory, statistical evaluation, and diagnostic application of a battery of tests. Chicago: Yearbook Publishers.
The Psychotherapy Research Project (Public Health Service Research Grant MH 8308 from the
National Institute of Mental Health; others funds: Menninger Foundation’s Fund for Research in
Psychiatry. Ford Foundation, Spencer Foundation) of the Menninger Foundation began in the early
1950s. The member of team were: David Rapaport, Merton Gill, Robert R. Holt, Phillip S. Holzman,
George Klein, Martin Mayman, Roy Schafer, and Herbert J. Schlesinger. Robert S. Wallerstein and
Otto Kernberg took over the leadership of the project, which took than 20 years to complete.
Richard S. Siegal was principal investigator and Irwin C. Rosen was coinvestigator. Stephen A.
Appelbaum published a inal report in 1977: The Anatomy of Change. A Menninger Foundation
Report on Testing the Effets of Psychotherapy.
Ellenberger, H. (1961). “La psychiatrie et son histoire inconnue”. Union Médicale du Canada, 90 (3),
281–289.
See: Delille, E. (forthcoming). “Henri Ellenberger in Schaffhausen (1943–1953): Die Geschichte der
dynamischen Psychiatrie als Exilliteratur”, op. cit.
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cope with the stress and the deception caused by a life of coninement at the asylum. First,
history is a narrative of the past. Secondly, one can ind indirect traces of nostalgia in the
last chapter of The Discovery of the Unconscious: among the quoted psychiatrists, there is
Henri Baruk (1897–1999) and Henri Ey (1900–1977), with whom Ellenberger was very close
during his medical internship in Paris in the 1930s, and with whom he exchanged letters for
a long time after his expatriation, until the 1970’s. But it would not be correct to say that
they played a central role in comparison with other physicians in charge of the main reforms
of post war asylums. Ellenberger pays them tribute because he remained attached to them.
Conversely, in The Discovery of the Unconscious, he never quoted the psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan (1901–1981), who become famous in the 1960s. Ellenberger also met him as resident
in psychiatry in the 1930s, but he was never inluenced by his work, as Lacan developed his
major concepts after Ellenberger had deinitively left Europe. Ellenberger was, from Paris
to Poitiers, then from Schaffhausen to Topeka and inally to Montreal an eternal “emigrant”
(Ausgewanderter, in Sebald’s sense39) who found, in this experience of exile, the means to
achieve his intellectual goals and ambitions.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Elisabetta Basso (Universidade de Lisboa), Professor Ivan Crozier
(University of Sydney), Division des Archives de l’Université de Montréal, Irène Ellenberger
(Montréal), Michel Ellenberger (Paris), Professor Eric Engstrom (Humboldt Universität zu
Berlin), Catherine Lavielle (Bibliothèque Médicale Henri Ey, Centre Hospitalier Sainte Anne),
Cécile Marcoux (Bibliothèque Sigmund Freud), Professor Richard Noll (DeSales University),
and Nadine Rodary (Bibliothèque Médicale Henri Ey, Centre Hospitalier Sainte Anne). I also
wish to thank Laura Haydock (Sciences Po Lille), who translated the irst draft of this article.
Archival materials
Henri Ellenberger’s papers and works are distributed among several collections: Centre
de Documentation Henri Ellenberger (Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne, 1 rue Cabanis, 75014,
France); archives of the University of Montreal (Division des Archives de l’Université de
Montréal, 2900 boulevard Édouard-Montpetit, Montreal, Canada). George Devereux’s papers
are held at IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, Abbaye d’Ardenne, 14280
Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe, France).
39
Sebald, W., G. (1997). The Emigrants, New York: New Directions Paperbook.
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