Introduction Nellie L Thompson, Ph.D. The papers published in this issue of American Imago were originally presented at the 80th Oral History Workshop of the APsaA meetings in February 2018. The topic of the workshop, "The Wolf-Man: Past and Present Encounters," was chosen to mark the centenary of the publication of Freud's "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (1918), an iconic case that has generated a complex and layered theoretical and clinical legacy. The aim of the workshop was to shed new light on Sergei Pankejeff's life before his analysis with Freud, and his long "afterlife" as Freud's most famous patient. Contributors used diverse historical sources and documents—some well-known and others newly available—to produce a rich trove of six papers that are an important contribution to scholarship on Sergei Pankejeff's life and its meaning for contemporary psychoanalysts. For example, Olga Umansky's paper, "The Wolf Man's Russia," draws on Russian and Ukrainian sources to present an absorbing visual and narrative description of the history of the Wolf Man's's family in Odessa, and the palatial estate where he spent his childhood and youth. John Baker's "Light and Darkness in Landscapes by the Wolf Man" is a close study of the Wolf Man's's creative process and a sensitive reading of how the vicissitudes of his psychological life found expression in his art. Pankejeff's afterlife as an iconic psychoanalytic patient is documented in his relationships with the analysts Muriel Gardiner and Kurt R. Eissler. "Muriel Gardiner and the Wolf Man: Preserving a Legacy" by Erika Schmidt explores the important role that Gardiner played in the Wolf Man's life and the ways that her personal history and friendship with Anna Freud influenced this role. [End Page 463] The voluminous interviews Kurt R. Eissler conducted with the Wolf Man over a number of years beginning in 1952 are thefocus of Craig Tomlinson's "A Few More Thoughts on Sergei Pankejeff." His paper describes the evolution of Eissler's long, unorthodox, but significant therapeutic relationship with Pankejeff. Tomlinson also points to the continuous, but varying, relationship that the psychoanalytic community has had with the Wolf Man case. Its current contested status, i.e., the question of whether the case should still be included in the curriculum of contemporary psychoanalytic education, is addressed in Soni Nirav's paper "On the Continuing Relevance of the Wolf Man to Psychoanalytic Education" The Wolf Man case is inextricably linked to Pankejeff's painting of his dream of the white wolves sitting in a tree outside his window. Diane O'Donoghue's paper turns our attention from this image to the illustrations of wild animals, including wolves, familiar to Freud in his youth, thus introducing a new element in the case of the Wolf-Man. Together these papers offer analysts and commentators much material to reflect on as we continue our engagement with Freud's "From a History of an Infantile Neurosis." [End Page 464] Nellie L Thompson, Ph.D. Chair of "The Wolf Man: Past and Present Encounters" Workshop Copyright © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press

Liberty, This Beautiful and Terrible Thing Forrest M. Hamer (bio) James Baldwin’s essay (1963/1993) was written in anticipation of the Emancipation Proclamation’s centennial. It locates itself in a tradition of living letters one generation writes to and for another; and, in particular, the tradition of one generation of slave descendants speaking to a younger one on this important anniversary—most recently exemplified in 2013 when Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote to his 15-year-old son fifty years after Baldwin wrote to his 15-year-old nephew. The existence of this tradition underscores the fact that the Emancipation was and is only the beginning of freedom for African slaves in America; and, that American freedom truly occurs over the course of several, if not many, generations. This tradition brings to mind a poem that has often moved me, a poem I first encountered when I was a teenager: “Frederick Douglass” by Robert Hayden (1966). It is a poem that helps complicate what freedom is and how it is achieved, and its last incarnation—the first version was published in 1947—was completed during the period of the centennial, and serves as a contemporary to Baldwin’s essay: When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautifuland terrible thing, needful to man as air,usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is morethan the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negrobeaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a worldwhere none is lonely, none hunted, alien,this man, superb in love and logic, this manshall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone, [End Page 301] but with the lives grown out of his life, the livesfleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing. (p. 78) Hayden’s poem is a sonnet, and like many modern American sonnets, loosens itself from the traditional formal conventions of rhyme, meter, and structural division. At the same time, it acknowledges those formal constraints with its 14 lines, divided roughly into two Petrarchan sections according to the Italian sonnet structure laid out centuries ago, and its general adherence to a five-beat-per-line rhythm. The first line (“When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful”) captures something about the poem’s efforts to speak something quite important about freedom—that freedom reaches beyond past and immediate limits, toward and perhaps even beyond body. The poem goes on to suggest that freedom becomes realized when it is literally embodied, moving from the abstract to the concrete, and moving from dream to life and in turn to many lives. But what also moves me, and brings this poem back to mind as I reflect on Baldwin’s essay, is Hayden’s reference to freedom not only as beautiful but, in the next line, as “terrible”; and I think, what’s terrible about freedom? One possible answer may be found in the poem itself, freedom presented as an unrealized but persistent longing that the poem’s original structure can barely contain; the poem also hints at the task of moving from the abstract to the real when we are talking about an ideal but elusive force that is “needful as air.” Moreover, in his own Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) wherein he discusses learning to read and write and his coming of age, Douglass wrote that in doing so he came into more awareness of the “wretchedness” of being a slave for life, indeed of the wretchedness of slavery itself. It became nearly unbearable. The more aware he became, the more terrible became the contrast between the freedom which seemed so elusive and the torment of knowing and thinking about his situation. Douglass writes: It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate [End Page 302] or inanimate. The silver trump...

Writing Under the Influence:The Scholarly Writer at Work Elise Miller (bio) The deepest and eternal nature of man, upon whose evocation in his hearers the poet is accustomed to rely, lies in those impulses of the mind which have their roots in a childhood that has since become prehistoric. —Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900, p. 247) Poets tend to think of themselves as stars because their deepest desire is to be an influence, rather than be influenced, but even in the strongest, whose desire is accomplished, the anxiety of having been formed by influence still persists. —Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (1975, p. 12) Freud is alluding to Homer in the passage above, as he does a number of times in The Interpretation of Dreams. Using scenes from The Odyssey and examples of his own anxiety dreams, Freud is analyzing "feelings of being inhibited, of being glued to the spot, of not being able to get something done" (p. 238), the kind of anxiety that is also the subject of this paper, which explores an aspect of scholarly writing and publishing that paralyzes many authors. Here is what they say about their struggles to write under the influence of intellectual predecessors as well as of the ghosts of personal and familial histories: "It's all been said before." "I'm sure someone has already written about this." "I have an idea, but I'm not even sure where I learned it." "How do I get started on a list of references?" "Who am I to be writing about_____?" "Who wants to hear from me?" It sometimes seems to me—as a college professor of writing and literature, a psychoanalytic scholar, and a clinician who specializes in writing impasses—that I spend my entire day listening to this catalogue of crippling concerns and anxieties. Because writers come to me for help not when their writing is going well, but when it isn't, they have a lot to teach [End Page 623] other writers. Something, or someone, is holding them back, keeping them in place, muting their voices, but it isn't only the authors they have studied in school. When I ask these writers to tell me more about their fears, they recall the words of past teachers who have summed up, as if once and for all, writer and writing: "Messy and all over the place." "Disappointing." "Robotic and emotionless; it's like you don't care." "Unreadable." "This is your worst work," and this chilling suggestion, "Drop out." These memories—shared by freshmen preparing their first college research paper, graduate students completing dissertations, and professors who have been encouraged to transform a well-received conference presentation into a journal article—have taught me that writing inhibitions do not discriminate on the basis of age, experience, or discipline. This is why, in composing the opening to this paper, I sometimes found myself performing the subject of my inquiry. As I sought to find a place in a conversation that dates back to ancient Greece, I turned to Harold Bloom, who uses Freud, one of the central "theorists of influence, of the giving that famishes the taker" (p. 11), to propose that poetry "comes only from a triumphant wrestling with the greatest of the dead" (p. 9). Bloom and Freud leave a legacy of insights into the creative process and the unconscious dimensions of fiction-writing, but what about the intellectual and psychological challenges that writers of scholarly books and academic papers encounter? Is there useful insight for them in the shadows of this research and theorizing about literature? Yes and no. Because their rigorous training in critical thinking, research, and argument often omits the psychological obstacles and challenges they might encounter, academic and scholarly writers must wrestle with the usual trials of writing as well as challenges exacerbated by the competitive pressures of intellectual public discourse and publishing. Left to fend for themselves, many of these writers are confused when they struggle to begin, sustain, or complete projects, or when professors, conference organizers, and journal editors—the gatekeepers of the public spaces of specialized knowledge—seek evidence that their submissions demonstrate knowledge of previous histories...

Scientific Theory on the Couch: A Response to Scott C. Taylor Randall Paulsen (bio) As I enjoyed wrestling with this rich and original paper a dream-like image came to my mind: Scott Taylor has placed science, itself, on the couch. As this body of science experiences being on the couch, it discovers that it has lost the ability to dismiss psychoanalysis as non-scientific because the psychoanalytic method now dwells inside it. The heartbeat of the psychoanalytic method (an observed relationship which provides a setting for dreams, associations, transference, and resistance) gives life to this body. In my response to Taylor, I would like to first touch upon the experience of individuals in psychoanalysis; then I will reflect on Loewald’s connection with Thomas Kuhn and psychoanalysis, before finally asking, has psychoanalysis ever been a “normal science”? The Individual in Psychoanalysis Experiencing Transformations We learn that Thomas Kuhn came from a psychoanalytic family. Alfred Adler had analyzed other family members and his mother recommended he try psychoanalysis because he was shy around young women. He found the over two-year experience “interesting as hell,” finished his thesis, and found his first wife. It would seem that his lasting debt to psychoanalysis came from his own experience of resistance, transference, and psychic restructuring which then endured as a heuristic method with which to study the dialectic evolution of science. As analysts, we listen to Taylor’s story of Thomas Kuhn on the couch from the vantage point of our own experience as analysands and analysts. We resonate to the sequence of “normal [End Page 405] science” as a “conflict-free period” in which data is gathered, which leads to resistance, followed by transference as a gateway to strangely familiar atavistic perceptions, becoming a private “scientific crisis.” At this critical moment, a transference-based interpretation becomes an experienced “Aha” which both clarifies and transforms simultaneously. Taylor’s, Kuhn’s, and then, Loewald’s unique appeal is that they provide a metaphorical framework in which the past is not so much overcome as transformed, and not only is the self changed, but also one’s perception of the world. Stephen Mitchell (2000) likens Loewald to an astronomer who believes that life begins with gestational density, birth likened to the Big Bang, from which differentiation, transformation, and integration proceed in a galactic manner. Kuhn appears to have experienced a good analysis in which his awareness of the process of psychological growth was cultivated. Being on the couch frees up awareness from the social vis-à-vis to the intrapsychic. One can even close one’s eyes. It is a bit like dreaming out loud with a trusted listener. But then the trust is shaken when the unseen listener appears to take on the guise of past personages, or the body becomes filled with troubling somatic memories. Objective and subjective experience repeat a dance over and over which gives the individual a new awareness of the patterns of self in evolution. I suspect Kuhn was able to experience this “framework” often enough that it became paradigmatic for him. I also found in Scott Taylor’s paper an implicit resonance between Thomas Kuhn and Wilfred Bion. They both have an interest in the similarities between intrapsychic life and group life. Kuhn’s notion of “normal science” can appear to involve a rule by orthodoxy. Many institutions of learning, psychoanalysis itself among them, can be seen as systems that oppress “thinking outside the box.” University faculty have lost their jobs in disagreements that exceeded the ruling paradigm. Bion also sees dependency, paranoia, and projection as forces that can bring a group’s capacity for useful work to a stop. A group, not unlike an individual, needs active, well-maintained self-awareness, in order to function and to adapt to changing conditions. [End Page 406] Loewald as a Bridge between Thomas Kuhn and Psychoanalysis Hans Loewald was born into a tragedy. His father died simultaneously with Hans’ birth. According to Stephen Mitchell (2000), Loewald’s mother placed the infant’s crib near the piano where she could both grieve and keep her infant son company by playing Beethoven sonatas. Loewald later framed a story that has accompanied me...

The Nazi concentration camps were a place of terror, violence, and murder, inmates being brutally stripped of their self-identity and humanity from the very moment of their arrival. This article examines the process and feeling of the "shattering of the self" prisoners experienced by analyzing three of the descriptions/images by which it is commonly depicted in the testimony literature: human objectification, "like dead," and infantile behavior. The first is discussed via ZalmanGradowski's records of his shift as a sonderkommando in Auschwitz, the second via Primo Levi's texts, and the third via Hinde Levy Linzer's Poems from Concentration Camps. These relate respectively to the process of the shattering and collapse, the feeling of dissolution, and the complex process of emotion and cognitive regression. Hereby, I propose reading traumatic texts as a traumatic space via a vicarious introspection based on "construction," "thickening" and "imagination."

Freud’s case study known as “The Wolf Man” preserved a classical version of Freud’s legacy, which was threatened by psychoanalytic politics after his death and by the realities of the Wolf Man’s post-termination life in which he suffered from significant anxiety and depression. Muriel Gardiner, whose life as a psychoanalyst, became intertwined with the Wolf Man’s, provided emotional and material support to him. Gardiner, Anna Freud and others in the psychoanalytic establishment worked to preserve Freud’s version of the Wolf Man. This paper tells Gardiner’s story in the context of the history of psychoanalysis. Le cas de « l’homme au loup » maintien une version classique du patrimoine de Freud qui a ete menace par l’etat politique de la psychanalyse apres sa mort ainsi que par lesrealites de la vie de l’homme au loup apres son analyse, a savoir son angoisse et depression considerable. Muriel Gardiner, dont la vie en tant que psychanalyste, deviendra entrelacee a celle de l’homme au loup, l’a soutenu emotivement ainsi que materiellement. Gardiner, Anna Freud et d’autres dans l’etablissement psychanalytique ont fait un effort afin de conserver la version freudienne de l’homme au loup. Cet article raconte l’histoire de Gardiner dans le contexte de l’histoire de la psychanalyse.

Reviewed by: Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice ed. by Adrienne Harris, Margery Kalb, and Susan Klebanoff Jane Hanenberg (bio) Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice. Adrienne Harris, Margery Kalb, and Susan Klebanoff, eds. London and New York: Routledge, 2017, 224 pages. "In every nursery there are ghosts. They are the visitors from the unremembered past of the parents; the uninvited guests at the christening. The intruders from the past have taken up residence in the nursery, claiming tradition and rights of ownership. While no one has issued an invitation, the ghosts take up residence and conduct the rehearsal of the family tragedy from a tattered script." —Fraiberg, S., Adelson, & E. Shapiro, V., 1975, p. 387-8 Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice emerged from the work of a consultation group and their project to understand the presence of the transmission of trauma through the analytic relationship. In therapeutic relations, trauma and its sequelae do not diminish over time. The effects of the inheritance of intergenerational and historical trauma are palpable but often indescribable. They are at once present and unknown. Like the ghosts in the nursery, trauma endures, and it creates a configuration akin to a generational and historical repetition compulsion. These are the qualities of the demons which this book investigates. Hans Loewald (1960) famously characterized the work of analysis as the work of turning "ghosts into ancestors." In these chapters, ghosts come alive to claim "the blood of recognition." In their task to deepen their understanding of this phenomena, the editors and writers devote the first half of their book to clinical descriptions of psychoanalytic work with patients whose lives are affected by severe trauma. The second portion consists of essays which address the breaches of historical and cultural memory in the face of such trauma. These narratives, which contribute social as well as personal meanings to the volume, both mirror and magnify the clinical portion of the book. All of the contributions are both deeply affecting and personally meaningful. Each chapter presents an opportunity to witness the daunting and complex endeavors of co-existing [End Page 274] with demons and ghosts, be it through transference or the recognition of a disavowed history. In the spring of 1917, after a recent censure of immigrants coming to the United States, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College cloaked and "shrouded" all works created or donated by immigrants. The coverings symbolically indicated the presence of the artwork and demonstrated what the museum's collection would have been like without them. The number of the covered objects was substantial. Under the black cloths, artwork was present, but unknown. As one might imagine, the African and Asian rooms contained oceans of fabric. Although the shrouds were positioned to emphasize the significant presence of immigrant art in the collections, their shapes and sizes conveyed another experience. They made the work mysterious and indescribable. The covering both hid and revealed the artists' identity at that precise moment in history. The demons discussed in these chapters reflect what viewers saw in the Davis' exhibit. How does one come to know lives or works that have been shrouded, or history that is cloaked? The editors and authors want to know how they can understand patients who have inherited histories from ghosts. How can disinherited grief be made known if the analyst is witness to a history that cannot be told? What is the cost of a premature burial of traumatic events? And a sorrowful but significant question: "What are the limits to mourning?" The book, which is published as part of Adrienne Harris and Lewis Aron's Relational Perspectives Book Series, has a companion volume, Ghosts in the Consulting Room, which uses a similar format to explore trauma of an equivalent but somewhat different nature. The consultation group was guided by a reading of Sam Gerson's lyrical essay, "When the Third is Dead: Memory Mourning and Witnessing in the Aftermath of the Holocaust"(2009). The essay explores the complex phenomena of "present absence," a state that occurs when...

The Figure in the Carpet: Psychoanalysis and Ways of Reading Rosemary Clare Rizq (bio) Introduction In an interview with Michael Neve in 1983 (Neve, 1992), Claire Winnicott discusses how her husband Donald went straight from university in Cambridge to working as the medical officer in charge on a destroyer in the Navy during the First World War. At one point she suggests that Winnicott, a first-year medical student at the time, may have known very little about the job and she confides almost as an aside: “[h]e had a lot of free time and read the novels of Henry James, as far as I can tell, most of the time. He had a lot of time for reading” (p. 179). It is not altogether surprising that the middle-class, well-educated Winnicott would have a lot of time for reading, but as psychoanalysts we might want to pause for a moment to imagine why he appears to have been drawn to a writer such as Henry James. Was it simply James’s supreme concern with the passage from innocence into adulthood and the painful and costly problems encountered on the path to emotional maturity? Certainly, as a psychoanalyst in the making, Winnicott was to develop this same theme in his theoretical writing throughout his life, charting in great and imaginative detail the infant’s journey from absolute dependence on maternal care to relative independence based on a hard-won capacity to be alone. Be that as it may, the imaginative fiction of Henry James has often been considered a particular source of interest for psychoanalysts, with Rivkin (2007) pointing out that James, whilst a “genius of consciousness is also—and necessarily—the genius of the unconscious” (p. 59). James’s writing can be seen to index a preoccupation akin to Freud’s with a kind of “doubling” [End Page 517] of the mind; a fascination with how the mind’s surface or consciousness acts as barometer of that which remains unseen below. Like the early Freud, James was to become increasingly interested in the eloquence of the unsaid; the way not being able to notice, understand or speak about something can lend it additional psychic weight. In his well-known labyrinthine literary style and complex syntactical constructions conveying the most fine-grained and nuanced of meanings, James imbues his protagonists’ tendency to erasure and omission with enormous cumulative emotional force. Indeed, the phenomenology of a confused, partial, and limited understanding is frequently deployed by James as necessary foil to his authorial mastery of allusion, nuance, hint, and suggestion. It is surely not a coincidence that these are literary skills Winnicott was himself to adopt in his own, highly idiosyncratic way, nor that he became, like James, capable of provoking considerable exasperation in his readers. But whilst James’s endlessly proliferating clauses are often considered overly rarefied and abstruse, it is Winnicott’s enigmatic concision that usually frustrates and puzzles his readers. Indeed, Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) argue that Winnicott “entices, baffles and provokes his readers, valuing them highly but never confronting them directly” (p. 190). If Winnicott valued his readers, so did James who claimed in 1908: In every novel, the work is divided between the writer and the reader; but the writer makes the reader very much as he makes his characters […] When he makes him well, that is, makes him interested, then the reader does quite the labour. (p. 18) “Making the reader” seems to involve the writer’s ability to incite a level of interest or curiosity that sets the reader off on the task of what Emerson, before James, once called “creative reading.” Creative, or close, attentive reading for James is central to an appreciation of his work and deemed interchangeable with what he calls the “supremely beneficent” art of literary criticism, something he thought demanded a “rare cluster of qualities”: curiosity, sympathy, and “perception at the pitch of [End Page 518] passion” (1893, p. 259–266). At its best, criticism for James implied the potential presence and attention of the kind of ideal reader he hoped his writing would produce. The Jamesian reader is one who above all has to do “quite the...

Life and Death in Sublimation: The Artistic Survival of Hans Reichel in World War II France Deborah L. Browning (bio) Introduction On the twentieth of October 1937 in Paris, 18 Villa Seurat of Henry Miller fame was crowded with visitors to the opening of an exhibition of the recent works of the forty-five-year-old, German émigré painter Hans Reichel. [Figure 1] It was being held in the second floor flat of the young American painter Betty Ryan. Miller and Ryan had planned this exhibition when they learned of the extent of financial hardship which had befallen their mutual friend. The guest book shows the signatures of Kandinsky, Miro, Duchamp, and Max Ernst, who adds “tres belle exposition!” The photographer Brassai was there. Others who signed in were the surrealist poet Raymond Queneau, the playwright Henri-René Lenormand, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, and of course, Henry Miller. Lenormand would pay an extremely high price—negotiated up by Ryan—for a particular favorite oil the painter had initially been reluctant to sell; [Figure 2] but with that money, Reichel would be able to settle his long overdue account at the Hôtel des Terrasses where he had been living across the hall from Brassai, and to move to new quarters, a tiny room, on a short dead-end street in Paris’s [End Page 563] Montparnasse area. 7 Impasse du Rouet would remain his home for the rest of his life—a good 13 years beyond the end of World War II and Reichel’s five years of war life, internments, and artistic productivity about which this essay is concerned.1 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Hans Reichel, 1930/1931 photo by Brassaï (Hans Reichel Archive) [End Page 564] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Hans Reichel 1925 No. 26 (Oil on canvas; 45.5 × 39.5) Unterlinden Museum, Colmar Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Hans Reichel 1927 No. 020 (Oil on cardboard; 21.5 × 23.5 cm) 1941 No. 026 (Watercolor on paper; 18.2 × 23.7 cm) [End Page 565] Across the Seine that October, the Germans and Russians had competed to see who could build the largest and most monstrous of the pavilions for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, while Picasso’s monumental “Guernica” hung in the Spanish pavilion as a memorialization and protest of that town’s destruction as a result of the Spanish Civil War. Yet more ominous, in Munich, the city of Reichel’s childhood and artistic beginnings, Hitler had already opened the exhibition of “degenerate art,” where some 650 paintings, drawings, and books from museums all over Germany, all deemed unacceptably vulgar and offensive by the Third Reich, were on display. And finally, to round out the context, in June of this year Freud had published “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” and by December would publish “Constructions.” As aware as anyone of the coming nightmare, earlier that year Freud had written to Arnold Zweig, “The political situation seems to be becoming ever more sombre. There is probably no holding up the Nazi invasion, with its baleful consequences [...] My only hope is that I shall not live to see it” (Jones, 1957, p. 213). The above vignette from 1937 is important because six years later, from a safe-house in southwestern France, living under a false identity, Reichel wrote to his friend Herta Hausmann that 1936 and 1937 were the best years of his life. In telling her this, he is conjuring up and writing down for another to read, a memory of a creative period when his career and recognition were at a peak, thus reminding himself of a crucial aspect of his sense of self—that of an artist. Reichel was not Jewish, but as a German living in France he was swept into that country’s response to the flood of refugees pouring across its borders, fleeing both the Spanish Civil War and the rise and spread of Hitler’s National Socialism. Panicked, France had essentially revoked its long-standing position on droit d’asile (right of asylum), also blurring the ambiguous distinction between immigrants and refugees (Caron, 1999...

The Experience of Prospect and Refuge: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Houses as Holding Environments Jeffrey Karl Ochsner (bio) I. Introduction: Wright and Winnicott William and Elizabeth Tracy were nothing if not persistent. In 1953, they wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright to request a design for their new home. They were, in a sense, “students” of Wright: at Michigan State University, Elizabeth Tracy had taken art courses from professors Alma Goetsch and Kathrine Winckler, who lived a Wright-designed house built in 1940. William Tracy had studied architecture and engineering at the University of Idaho. In summer 1952, they had traveled across the Midwest, visiting Wright buildings in Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. But when they contacted the Wright office in 1953, an apprentice wrote back that Wright was too busy, the distance (to the Pacific Northwest) was too far, and their budget was too small. So they contacted a local architect, Milton Stricker, who had been a Wright apprentice. Once Stricker met the Tracys, recognized their commitment to Wright’s ideas, and saw their lot overlooking Puget Sound, he agreed to help. Thus, in August 1954, when the Tracys again contacted Wright, he responded positively. The Tracys’ commitment did not end there. They proposed that the house might use the modular concrete block system that Wright had developed, which integrated design and construction; he called the system, and the houses built with it, “Usonian Automatics.”1 Based on Wright’s drawings (completed [End Page 179] in December 1954), they commissioned a set of metal forms with wood inserts to make the different types of concrete blocks required for the 1150-square-foot house. Beginning in spring 1955, the Tracys themselves cast blocks twice a day, five days each week, for nearly a year, producing the more than 1700 individual concrete blocks needed for the project (Ochsner, 2012).2 Once construction began in July 1955, there was no possibility of taking a break: they had to cast enough blocks each day to stay ahead of their contractor; when not casting blocks, they also participated in the construction process (Fig. 1). The house was completed in 1956. The Tracys lived in the house until their deaths—William in 2008 and Elizabeth in 2010. The Tracys’ story seems extraordinary, but stories of similar devotion are told by many of Wright’s residential clients. Some, having lived in one Wright house, came back for a second, and even a third.3 Owners forced to leave their Wright-designed houses usually departed “with considerable reluctance” (Twombly, 1979, p. 260).4 Scholars, too, have noted the passionate responses that Wright-designed houses evoke, particularly from their owners. Even the general public has not been immune to the attractions of Wright houses; today more than twenty are open to the public—over a dozen as museums, and others for scheduled tours. Some require reservations made months in advance.5 Such enthusiasm seems all the more extraordinary given the many deficiencies of these buildings—Wright houses frequently went over budget, proved difficult to furnish, and presented numerous material and detailing problems including leaking roofs—not to mention requiring their owners to cope with Wright’s often cantankerous personality. Few architects could survive these kinds of failings, yet through much of his career Wright was besieged with commissions (Hildebrand, 1991, p. 15). Indeed, by any measure, Wright’s architectural achievements have rarely, if ever, been equaled. The centrality of Wright’s career to the story of architecture in the twentieth century has made it the subject of an immense body of scholarship that places the work in its time, explores individual buildings in detail, and demonstrates Wright’s influence on the emergence and development of modern architecture.6 Still, the basis for the unusual appeal of Wright’s work, particularly his houses, has remained elusive. To give [End Page 180] just one example, in a 1976 study of Wright’s smaller houses, English architect John Sergeant suggested the “materials and spatial characteristics . . . gave a sense of serenity, variety, and security,” but this is more description than explanation (1976, p. 27). Other accounts have traced the emotional impact of these houses to material properties, spatial archetypes, and the like (Norberg...