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Congratulations to David James (Jimmy) Fisher, PhD, who on May 19, 2023, was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award in Psychohistory and Psychoanalysis from the International Psychohistorical Association and the journal Clio's Psyche.

The award, which honors Dr. Fisher's numerous scholarly contributions to the field, was bestowed during the International Psychohistorical Association’s 46th Annual Conference. Robert Nye, Professor Emeritus of History at Oregon State University, provided cogent remarks on Jimmy's scholarship and contributions to the field of European Cultural History and Psychohistory; he also underscored Jimmy's clinical abilities and his accomplishments as a teacher. 

Dr. Nye's remarks:

Jimmy Fisher is my oldest friend, not in age, but in duration. I met him in 1966 in Madison, Wisconsin when I was a teaching assistant in an early modern European history class and he was one of my students. My memory is that he was intensely engaged in discussions, argumentative, but nonetheless diffident and a bit detached. One day after class he stayed behind and walked up to me and said: “How does a guy like me get to know a guy like you?” “Buy me a beer,” I replied. And he did (you could drink beer at 18 in Wisconsin in those days). This was for me an unusual experience. My friendships had grown slowly out of common experience, shared interests, and likenesses. My friendship with Jimmy Fisher was willed, initially by him, and after awhile, by me. Jimmy had the other kind of friend too, but he often has taken the initiative to forge friendships with people he admires and then dispense with small talk and move directly into intimacy. He has written in autobiographical passages of his proclivity to hero-worship, which he knows about and tries to resist, but has often succumbed to. This has by no means impeded his critical acumen; on the contrary, it has sharpened it, as anyone who has read his work knows.

We socialized, we drank beer, we exchanged visits. My marriage was on the rocks and he listened to my rants, offering me refuge and a bed at his place when I needed it. As he has written many times, he gravitated to the charismatic and brilliant teachers George Mosse and Harvey Goldberg, immersed himself, as most of us did, in the radical politics the Madison campus was known for, and sought themes in his reading and his classes that spoke to the issues of the day, feeling his way gradually into the role of a committed intellectual. The most striking thing about him, even in these early days, was his love of dialogue and relentless pursuit of the truth. He was agile and engaged in group discussions, but his forte was one-on-one conversation. His favorite phrase, as long as I have known him, is “What’s your analysis?” And he would gently press you until you thought long enough and hard enough about the matter at hand to shed some light. His own contributions to these dialogues were intense and aimed at contributing what he could to the conversation, but never at the cost of interrupting its flow. Everything was grist for the mill: sports, movies, books, personalities, families, women, our teachers, and politics, especially politics. As Ellen Schrecker has noted in The Lost Promise, her recent book about American universities in the 60’s, the Madison campus was a hot spot of opposition to the Vietnam War with sit-ins, teach-ins, mass meetings, and disruptions of military and corporate recruiting.

Though George Mosse was not my major professor, he was my chief mentor and the inspiration for my own dissertation and for many others, which, as Jimmy has written, we all hoped would be “relevant.” I got my PhD in 1969 and found a job, but the following cohort, of which Jimmy was a part, was not so lucky. After he finished his degree in 1973, he spent a few years in Paris, and when he returned to the states became a “gypsy scholar,” moving through a series of one-year jobs. As he has written, he blamed the profession, he blamed himself, and he developed a dismissive, argumentative style that endeared him to few and displaced for the time being the intense, problem-solving dialogues for which he had such a gift. One of his traits from those years, which he had earlier honed as the oldest of three brothers, was to thrust his index finger in your face as he loudly made his points. We saw one another regularly in those years and later, sometimes at conferences, or at our homes, or in Paris, New York, or at his parent’s house in Westchester. Marty and Bess welcomed Mary Jo and I warmly and I enjoyed seeing the sibling dynamics between Jimmy, Andy and Larry.

Jimmy acknowledges that reading Freud’s texts was an integral part of the cultural and intellectual history of our generation’s learning experience.  I taught some of them myself in my own courses, taking care as my teachers had done, to treat Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis in historical context and track Freud’s own borrowings from his psychiatric contemporaries, which he then turned to his own uses. We were also attracted to Marxism and Marx’s texts and many in our generation tried to combine these two intellectual traditions that sought to reveal the deep underpinnings of individual and socio-political action. Jimmy’s dissertation on the French intellectual Romain Rolland was an effort to better understand how Rolland and other European leftists and communists squared their aesthetic and epistemic commitments with political engagement from the end of the nineteenth century through WWII. When it finally was published in 1988, it had become an encyclopedic and profound meditation on the meaning and limits of intellectual activism in this chaotic and brutal era.

But while he was continuing his research in France between 1973 and 1975, he had one of those fortuitous archival discoveries that changed everything: a cache of unpublished letters between Rolland and Sigmund Freud over the period 1923 until Freud’s death. It happened that not only was Rolland familiar with some of Freud’s writings, and vice versa, but they were both friends of the Austrian writer and biographer Stefan Zweig, with whom Rolland had often discussed Freud. On its face, they could not have been more different: a music-loving aesthete with a deep appreciation of mysticism, for whom an illusion was a “fact,” and Freud, who Rolland addressed in one note, “To the Destroyer of Illusions Prof. Dr. Freud.” They exchanged their books with one another, but both remained deeply skeptical of the other’s views, despite a cordial and affectionate correspondence.

Freud sent Rolland a copy of The Future of an Illusion on its publication in 1927, and in his response Rolland urged him to investigate the religious feeling and sensation that underlay all forms of religious expression. This “oceanic” feeling, he wrote, is a direct contact with “the true subterranean source of religious energy—which next is tapped, canalized, and desiccated by the Churches….” Rolland did not object to Freud’s critique of established religion, but, as Jimmy puts it, thought that a “psychoanalytic inquiry into spontaneous religious sensation,” would bear fruit. As many of you know, Freud made a reference at the outset of the book he was writing at that time, Civilization and its Discontents, to a friend’s “oceanic” feeling, and set out his explanation for it in psychoanalytic terms as a sensation that preceded the formation of the ego that “reality testing” would later dissipate. However, in their following correspondence, Jimmy identifies memory lapses on Freud’s part about earlier letters that “suggests the possible repression of some conflict or unpleasurable feeling.” In the brilliant article which he published in American Imago in 1976 Jimmy goes on to analyze Freud’s “defensiveness” toward Rolland, the “blend of attraction and repulsion, respect and envy, and above all the strange sensation that he and Rolland were utterly different.” This did not inhibit Freud from inscribing the second edition to Rolland with the words: “From the Terrestrial Animal to his Great Oceanic Friend,” which became the title of Jimmy’s article.

Later in the paper, Jimmy analyzes Freud’s letter to Rolland on the latter’s 70th birthday and the “open letter” to Rolland “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis,” based on his experience during a trip to Athens in 1904 with his younger brother Alex. Jimmy then dives into Mark Kanzer’s analysis of Freud’s ambivalence to Rolland in “A Disturbance of Memory,” to suggest it doesn’t go far enough. Freud’s oedipal and critical ambivalence toward his father was projected onto his younger brother, who was the same age as Rolland, and his relationship with Rolland, “In Freud’s mind, re-enacted the father-son pattern in terms of an elder brother’s feelings for a cherished younger sibling.” Jimmy thus bolsters Freud’s demonstrable ambivalence toward Rolland with an interpretation drawn directly from Freud’s own theories. This was, it seems to me, a fairly bold psychoanalytic move for a guy who had read some of Freud’s texts and letters but was still hoping to make a career out of being a cultural historian. This was surely the first clear evidence of Jimmy’s confident first steps in a new personal and professional direction. 

Jimmy applied to the Los Angeles Psychoanalytical Institute and undertook his training between 1980 and 1988. The Institute harbored, more or less harmoniously, the major traditions of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Together with his own reading and experience with Lacanian analysis, this background gave him a uniquely eclectic perspective that he has put to excellent use in his historical and critical writings. As he says in his introduction to Cultural Theory and Psychoanalytic Tradition (1991), he believes, “The most penetrating psychoanalytic method still seems to be a historical and critical one; here my training in psychoanalysis complements my prior formation as a cultural historian.” He organizes the essays in this book in three divisions: The History of Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Culture Criticism, and Psychoanalytic History. One can see the same blending of historical and psychoanalytic methods and criticism in all the work he has published since 1991. His book on Bruno Bettelheim, his exposition of Bettelheim and Rudolf Ekstein’s letters (which recalls his analysis of the Freud-Rolland correspondence), and his ventures into psychoanalytic literary criticism and politics are all historically contextualized, and deeply informed by psychoanalytic insight.

In the field of the history of psychoanalysis, he has written illuminating essays on Sabina Spielrein, Otto Fenichel, the Lacanian movement in France, and a piece on the psychoanalytic free clinics, a movement in central Europe between the wars to offer free or low-fee psychotherapy for indigent or marginalized patients. My favorite piece in this domain, mixing history and culture criticism is his masterful analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Freud Scenario” a movie script Sartre wrote for John Huston between 1958 and 1960. The script was never wholly adopted for the screen, but Jimmy complicates the standard notion of Sartre as skeptical of psychoanalysis by showing how Sartre created a very Freudian intersubjective dialogue between Freud and Viennese anti-Semitism, his patients, and father figures in his education to account for Freud’s own self-analysis, his understanding of Oedipal conflicts, and his rage at being a despised minority in his native land. The essays Jimmy wrote on this subject show firm grasp of both existentialist philosophy, Sartre’s own biography, and, of course, psychoanalytic theory. On psychoanalysis itself, the bravura piece Jimmy wrote on erotics and sexual excitement in Robert Stoller’s case study of “Belle” is a perfect illustration of the intersubjective nature of the analyst-analysand relationship and the fluid dynamics of transference and counter-transference.

Finally, Jimmy’s brief account of his last visit to his father, near death and suffering from dementia, reveals his both his tenderness and empathy, and his sense of the limits of compassion.

Finally, though he is here celebrated as an analyst and a scholar, I want to note that he has always been a superb and supportive teacher, in the academic classroom, and as a psychoanalytic educator. He was awarded Faculty of the Year honors in 2015 at the New Center for Psychoanalysis, and in 2020 was named Distinguished Psychoanalytic Educator by The International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education.

There is a good reason to think that historical training is a good foundation for good psychohistory. Congratulations on this well-deserved award, my man.