Dr John Steiner (Ed)
Rosenfeld in Retrospect

  Interview

   Interview with Dr Albert Mason
   Michael Feldman & John Steiner
   27 November 2007

Introduction

Albert Mason is a colourful member of the British Psychoanalytical Society who has been a major influence supporting a Kleinian approach in Los Angeles. As he reports in this interview he took up hypnosis soon after he qualified in Medicine, and made a significant contribution to that field before he changed his approach and became a psychoanalyst. He moved to Los Angeles in the late sixties at the same time as Wilfred Bion and had a close relationship with him. He also retained his connections to England and the British Society making frequent visits here. He has written many papers and reviews but is perhaps best known for his paper on hypnotism in which he suggests that the influence of the hypnotist on the patient requires a shared delusional system, a folie a deux¹.



This interview with Michael Feldman and John Steiner took place on November 27th, 2007, during a visit in London. This is an edited version of that interview.

Audio

The initial step from hypnosis to analysis

AM: ... Well, you know I started life as a hypnotist. I was an anaesthesiologist and I was interested in delivering babies without anaesthetising them so I read about hypnosis and that’s how I started: by delivering babies under hypnosis.

JS: You taught yourself hypnosis?

AM: Yes, I got a book and read how to do it and tried it. It was very successful, but rather time consuming. The moment you get known as a hypnotist, people send you all sorts of strange cases to hypnotise. So I had a little clinic in the evening where I treated cases other people in the hospital used to send me. It was Queen Victoria hospital, East Grinstead, a famous plastic surgery hospital where Sir Archibald McIndoe worked, the plastic surgeon who treated all the burnt airmen during the war. It’s really the home of plastic surgery in England.

I became known as the wart king because warts went with hypnosis, which is very strange since they’re viral. One of the things that I did, was I treated warts unilaterally. The warts appeared on both the hands and I was able to get rid of them on one hand which I thought was extraordinary because it means that it is not a systemic thing. So that was how I amused myself on Tuesday evenings.

Then one day I was giving an anaesthetic to a young man who I thought was covered in warts. You couldn’t put a pin in between them, there were millions and I wheeled him into the theatre after anaesthetising him and, being rather omnipotent, I said to the surgeon, “Why don’t you treat this with hypnosis?” and he turned round and said “Well, why don’t you?” and he walked out of the theatre leaving me with this case. So I wheeled him away, woke him up and said “Mr Moore wants me to treat you by hypnotism.” This was a 15 year old kid. He said OK. So I hypnotised him and told him that the warts would go from his left arm, and sent him away. He came back a week later and showed me his left arm which was clear. I took him back to the surgeon and showed him these two arms, and I said to him, “Well, I told you the warts would go.” He said “This is not warts you bloody fool, this is a condition called congenital ichthyosiform erythroderma. It’s congenital and incurable. Don’t touch any more of him or no-one will believe you.”

So we then took him down to the Royal Society Dermatological Section and showed him with one arm clear and the rest of him as before covered in warts and it was a rather sensational demonstration. I then treated the rest of him by hypnosis. 70% cleared up and I published it in the British Medical Journal with photographs. Then the phone started to ring and all the national newspapers picked it up. And it was published all over the world, including Time Magazine. Calls came in by the 100s, letters came in by the 100s and cases came, most of them incurable diseases. So, I was given a research post to continue this work at St George’s hospital where I treated chronic skin disorders and I published a series of a 100. These were all chronic skin disorders and about 70% of them got well.

All this time I didn’t understand what I was doing and a friend of mine said, “Why don’t you go and talk to Clifford Scott? He knows something about this sort of thing”. So I went to the Maudsley and presented this series of cases and he sat and he listened and said “How long did you treat each case for?” I said “I saw them for an hour and talked to them, got them coming back every week until they cleared up”. He said “How long were they treated in the skin department?” I said “Well, you know, a few minutes, paint them green, paint them blue”. He said “Well, what you’ve shown is that more time and trouble produces better results.” So, there went my paper on the treatment by hypnosis and by this time I was absolutely confused and wanting to know what was I doing, so I got a job as a registrar in psychiatry at the West London hospital under Spencer Patterson and Dennis Hill. Dennis Hill was very interested in it. I also then decided because I had two good friends, I was at medical school with, Irving Krieger and Lionel Krieger, who were going to train as analysts. So, they said why don’t you do psychoanalytic training and that’s how I took up psychoanalysis.

Analytic training, interview with Winnicott, beginning analysis with Hanna Segal, and abandoning hypnosis

So, I applied and was interviewed by Winnicott who said “Which group do you want to go in?” and I said “I don’t know”. He said “If you don’t know you go in the middle group.” So, I said OK. I went back home, spoke to Irving and Lionel and they said which group are you going in and I said, well, I’m going in the middle group, so Irving said “Why are you doing that? I said I don’t know the difference. He said go in the Klein group because they do all the middle group do and they do a bit more. So I said more? So I called Winnicott back and said could I change my mind and go in the Klein group and he said of course but, tell me, why did you change your mind? I said well, my friend Irving said you get more. Winnicott said, well you could say that. And that was how I ended up. And he said did you have an analyst in mind and I said, no, I didn’t know one from the other, so, he says “Well, Hanna Segal has a vacancy, would you like to go?” and I said “yeah” and that was how I ended up. Talk about luck, you see, and you imagine where I could have ended up and how I could have ended up.

So I went into analysis with Hannah Segal and in those days, I don’t know if it’s still the case, they take you on temporarily at the institute, for six months and then they re-evaluate. So after six months they re-evaluated and said I could not continue. I tried to find out why and they said, well, when you applied, we thought you were doing hypnosis as a sort of interim on your way to doing psychiatry and analysis, we never realised that you had an international reputation as a hypnotist and that you had written a book on hypnosis and that’s not suitable for a candidate at the institute. So they resigned me but Hanna said she would keep me on as a patient. So, I stayed on as a patient and after about three years analysis, I gave up hypnosis because I began to understand what I was doing which was shifting symptoms around from one system to another. I used to get folders of case notes of patients moving from the Asthma Clinic to the Skin Clinic, the Headache Clinic to the Gastro-intestinal clinic. I also got a research fellowship for asthma because I published about four papers on asthma featured in the BMJ.

I treated various series and that was another eye opener because I found that the doctors who were doing hypnosis and measuring their own results had much better results than the doctors who were measuring the results of other people. So obviously, I began to think that the doctors were just as hypnotised as the patients. And I found that certain patients would come in and say their wheezing had gone when I could hear the wheezing across the room. There was also a series of experiments I did where I produced anaesthesia and deafness in volunteer patients and we did the cortical evoked potentials. I found that when you put a needle in you got a spike even though the patients said they couldn’t feel anything. And, so, that was my entry into analysis and I reapplied to the Institute and they accepted me after three years analysis.

I had a mother who was very ill when I was a child, and so the need to cure was really linked to my relationship to an ill mother and that’s just what you need to be a hypnotist. You need a kind of furor therapeutica. The congenital case I cured, I’m sure, needed to be cured as much as I needed to cure him and something strange happened. After that case, half a dozen ichthyotics came to see me and I never cured another one. By that time I knew it was incurable, so, there was the difference, that kind of conviction I had that I could cure him was no longer there. So that was really my history and how I became an analyst.

Analysis with Hanna Segal

JS: What was it like with Hanna Segal? Do you remember?

AM: My analysis with Hanna? Tough! I mean she was tough. She kept me on as a patient, when I was stopped from training. I had ten years with her, ten or eleven years. What was it like? It changed my life, that’s what it was like. From a hypnotist to an analyst. It’s a big change, I suppose. It’s the move from the manic to the depressive, I suppose.

American Origins

I was born in America. I left when I was a year and a half old because my mother was told she was home sick. She had intractable pain and when she got to England they operated on and found 13 gall stones. Anyway, she took me and my brother and sister back to England. I always had an American passport which was rather strange and some early memories of America, one of the reasons I’m sure that I went back.

JS: Where did your family come from before then?

AM: They came from London and then from Russia. My father had a lot of brothers in the States and he popped over to join them. So, I grew up in London and went vacationing in various places all over the world.

The move to the US with Bion

Some people from Los Angeles had seen me present a case at the International Congress and they invited me to give a seminar in Beverley Hills, which I did and they then said, well, why don’t you come here and teach us about Klein. I was very nervous about that. At that time Rosenfeld and Segal had gone to the States lecturing, Betty Joseph had also gone and they were interested in any one of them going to the States. And they asked Wilfred Bion and he thought that it would be quite an adventure. Why he went is obscure. He said that he went because he had become loaded with honours and he was afraid he would disappear without a trace. He also said that he went to write and to get away from the administrative situation he found himself in London. I’m not sure; I think there were a lot of reasons why he went. But I then spoke to him because I was having supervision with him and said I’d been asked to go, what did he think about my going when he went. He said, well, it would be very nice for someone to do supervisions on the cases I analysed and that was how we went off together, so to speak. He had about half a dozen analysts wanting re-analysis and they came into supervision with me and that was how we started.


MF: This was the time that Greenson was a very powerful figure?

AM: Yes, this was the time that Greenson gave a lecture called “Freud or Klein” and I was stupid enough to discuss it. Rosenfeld has discussed it at the international the year before and I should have known that I was walking into something dangerous. It happened to be Greenson’s birthday and there was a big birthday cake in the front of the hall there and Greenson gave his lecture and I gave my discussion of his lecture. One of the things he said was that he didn’t believe that projective identification existed except in some deteriorated psychotics. But he had also written a paper where he described how he had unconsciously plagiarised some of Freud. He found that certain things he had written were underlined in his edition of Freud. So, I jumped at the opportunity and said, well, he doesn’t believe in projective identification which is the stealing envied qualities from someone and projecting into them hated parts of the self, but this was exactly what had happened when he unconsciously plagiarised Freud. He stole his ideas and projected his ignorance into Freud. Well, you could imagine. He pointed a trembling finger at me and said “The chutzpah! He comes from London to call me a plagiarist!” And everybody hissed me and that was my entry into the American psychoanalytic world. Nevertheless they accepted me as a member of their institute and asked me to teach six lectures on Klein. There was opposition to Greenson too.

Anyway I taught there, the USC School of Medicine gave me a full clinical professorship. I taught the residents and taught at the institute. After about two years teaching at the institute, Greenson complained to the American that candidates were becoming confused by the Kleinians and so the American issued an edict – no Kleinians should be allowed to teach, train or supervise. Anyway, that resulted in the breakaway of a lot of people who had become influenced by Wilfred and myself, and Sue Isaacs came over when I invited her and stayed for five years until her husband died. So we had a little group and I ran seminars and Bion analysed some of them. I supervised some of them and then started to analyse some of them and that was really how the Psychoanalytic Centre of California started. That was the disenfranchised people from the two institutes there, they formed the PCC. Of course now it’s changed enormously; now they want me to teach in all the institutes and I can’t cope with the requests to teach from them and we have about 100 members of the PCC and that’s really how it all came about.

MF: Did you feel it was a problem that you had to partially sever your links with London, with the British Society?

AM: Well, we invited people over all the time, so I kept in contact with people like Betty Joseph and Hanka who came over several times and Hans Thorner came over, and Herbert came over several times. I missed being in a group of people where I could go and get help. I did have a couple of more supervisions with Wilfred... but it was really not the kind of supervision that you got from people like Rosenfeld and Betty Joseph. And Meltzer. I had a lot of supervision with all of them. And they were all very keen observers of the here and now. Anyway, I went on and I got a lot of candidates, and a lot of re-analyses and some of them have done quite well.

Bion’s personality and the impact of his state of health on his analytic work

I had a terrible experience with him. When he first went to the States, a west coast psychoanalytic organisation invited him to give a plenary lecture and he gave a lecture on cure. He talked for about five minutes about something and then he described an opera singer he had in treatment who one day let out an ear splitting shriek which went on and on. He said he began to get worried that people wouldn’t want him working in his consulting room and said to her, “You’re putting into me the feeling that nobody will want to associate with me, and she stopped screaming. He stopped and asked, “Was that a cure?” He stopped and asked the audience for questions. He must have spoken for 12, 15 minutes at most and there were 800 people there; all the analysts on the west coast. There was dead silence; you could have heard a pin drop. I put my hand up and I asked him some question, I can’t remember what, which he answered very obscurely. Dead silence again, and people started to get up and walk out. It was a horrible situation.


JS: Did he feel it? You obviously felt it.

AM: Well, he must have felt it because you couldn’t miss it. 800 people walking out and nobody asked a question. Finally, one man, who was well known as a Communist, analyst asked his some question about Russia and they ended the lecture. It was a fiasco. I’ve seen him give other lectures where he wandered around in a circle, came back to the point and they were rather brilliant in a way but he was not a good lecturer. He never had notes and sometimes he caught a theme and had some wonderful ideas.

Early analytic influences

JS: Can we take you back to the London scene? Who else were you influenced by?

AM: Meltzer. I found him a wonderful help with very disturbed patients. I had two people in supervision with Meltzer. I had two people in supervision with Rosenfeld; Rosenfeld was a wonderful supervisor and so was Meltzer. Meltzer’s contact with the unconscious was uncanny at times. Who else? Betty Joseph, of course.

Oh, Eric Brenman is a friend of mine, since I was a candidate. He and Stanley Leigh, Irving Krieger, who went into analysis with Paula Heimann, which I always thought was very sad. He persuaded me to become a Kleinian and he found himself in analysis with Paula. Harold Stewart who I started off as a hypnotist because, in those days, I had hundreds of cases coming in and didn’t know what to do with them, so I referred them to people who wanted to do hypnosis and Harold then did the same as I did. Sandy Bourne, is a good friend of mine.

Of course, Wilfred. I got to know Wilfred after supervision with him because he used to live in Croydon, and when he was teaching at the institute which was in the evenings, he stayed in town in between his work and his teaching. I invited him home for dinner, when he was teaching, so, I got to know him that way. He was, in fact very, very funny man. I asked his children, did he mean to be funny because I was never sure whether he meant to be funny or not and they said, yes, he means it.

Albert Mason’s influence in the US

MF: What I find tremendously impressive is the way you established such a strong and influential presence there yourself. It is related to Bion but it’s very much your own.

AM: That was all because of my teaching. I taught at USC, with a campus of 28,000 people and a big psychiatric school; I taught there for 20 years. I used to have a seminar of residents come every two weeks to my home for 20 years, presenting cases. I must have influenced 10 of those residents to become analysts. I also taught at all the institutes.

MF: But you also maintained a very solid link with fundamental aspects of psychoanalysis in a very tough minded way which is, I think, is so impressive.

AM: Well, I certainly didn’t like being pushed around by Greenson and by the way Kleinians were not to be allowed to teach, and train. I appealed, and I got up at the international meeting and said there’s discrimination in Los Angeles against Kleinians. This led the International to send an investigating group down to Los Angeles. So, I did achieve something with that. It was mainly Greenson’s influence and I felt outraged by him and his group.

JS: You weren’t homesick like your mother. Perhaps you took something internal with you there that sustained you.

AM: Well, I felt that I had been helped enormously in my analysis and training, and that kind of conviction you can’t get rid of. I mean, that’s the kind of conviction you need, isn’t it? I mean I changed from being a hypnotist and all that meant internally to being a analyst.

JS: You weren’t tempted to go back to hypnotism which would be quicker for the manic side of the person.

AM: I understood too much about it. One of the things, I think, that changed me was that I realised that I was working on a transference cure, a positive transference. What I didn’t realise, at first was that it wasn’t all positive. A lot of it was fear. I thought, well you know, positive transference, so much of medicine does that, so much of skin disorders are influenced by that. That wasn’t too bad but when I realised that, in fact, there was an element of placating me and real fear of what I stood for, I then dropped it. It’s an interesting research tool, however, and in that the work I did with anaesthesia, there were some interesting results.

JS: Although you can say that you understood it more, that it was a folie a deux, for example, it is nevertheless quite remarkable how a change in mental state can have such visible somatic effects.

AM: Absolutely! Absolutely! Well, suggestion can do remarkable things at times but you can’t count on it you see. You can do some remarkable things. I mean, the treatment of warts is really remarkable when you think about it. Why and how does it happen? And the fact that one arm went could be cured and not the other so that it couldn’t be systemic. How does one explain it? And, of course, some psychoanalysis is suggestion too. We make interpretations and we think the patient understands them because they respond as though they do but how much of that is also idealisation.

MF: And fear.

AM: And fear. Yeah. Part fear.

JS: Fearful compliance ?

AM: That’s right.

MF: Roy Schafer’s written a paper on coercion, which I think is also quite interesting to the extent which the patient feels coerced and our interpretations of them have a coercive element to them.

AM: That’s right. That’s right. One of the things I raise in this paper that I have given at the conference for Hanna Segal, which at first was a bit of a joke. I started it because of a meeting on mythology at which Grotstein talked about the unconscious elements in Greek myth and I talked about unconscious elements in popular song which I thought were the myths of today. In fact, a question about symbolism arose from one of the songs, and I asked Hannah Segal, about her classic paper, Symbol and Symbolic Equation, about the boy who thought his violin was his penis. I asked her the question “Did the boy’s mother think that his fiddling was more exciting than her husband’s dull everyday communications”. In other words, I wonder whether that played a part in the concretisation of that symbol.

JS: That would be another folie a deux.

AM: That’s right. That’s right. Which I find to be extraordinarily common, the support of the parent for some kind of delusion that the child has.

JS: That must also be an issue in an analysis. To what extent is the analyst unconsciously supporting a delusion.

AM: Yeah, And that’s what hypnotism is. It’s two people in a mutual delusional system which are supporting each other. But it could produce extraordinary things. I think there are similar delusional things in several areas.


 

1. Mason, A.A. (1994). A Psychoanalyst Looks at a Hypnotist: A Study of Folie À Deux. Psychoanal. Q., 63:641-679.

Copyright © 2007  The Melanie Klein Trust