Aaron Esterson
25 September 1923 –15 April 1999
Obituary
Anthony Stadlen
Copyright © Anthony Stadlen 2000
Existential Analysis 11.1 (January 2000: 157-161)
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| Aaron Esterson |
DR AARON ESTERSON, who has died
at the age of seventy-five, was unusual among twentieth-century
psychotherapists in his concern that his patients should recognise not merely
repressed sexual desire, but also repressed ethical sensibility.
Taking fierce
issue with the tendency to treat moral matters as medical problems, Esterson
held that at least some madness was a
self-indulgence for which the sufferer or enthusiast could learn to assume moral
responsibility. He was in broad agreement with Thomas Szasz, who spoke of the
‘myth’ of mental illness.
He devoted his
life to, among other things, clarifying the complex question of madness.
In Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964), a
report on Esterson’s research with families of ‘schizophrenics’, he and R. D.
Laing questioned the evidence for the existence of ‘schizophrenia’. ‘Are the
experience and behaviour that psychiatrists take as symptoms and signs of
schizophrenia,’ they asked, ‘more socially intelligible than has come to be
supposed?’
The book is a
‘classic’. It is very readable. But few people, and certainly few
‘professionals’, have read it with care. It was published in the series
‘Studies in Existential Analysis and Phenomenology’ edited by Laing. But which
‘existential analysts’ or ‘phenomenologists’ today could tell you what Laing
and Esterson were asking, let alone what their question means?
The question
does have a certain ambiguity, as Esterson acknowledged shortly before his
death. But the meaning is plain from the context. He and Laing were questioning
the existence of the hypothetical
‘illness’ ‘schizophrenia’. This idea is evidently too simple for most people to
register, far less think about. Most readers – including most ‘existential
phenomenologists’ – assume, despite what the authors say, that they are arguing
that family interaction is a factor in the ‘aetiology’ of the ‘illness’ whose
very existence Laing and Esterson are questioning in the book itself. Their
question has sunk without trace in today’s bland ‘interdisciplinary’ approach.
Not that
Esterson denied, or romanticised, madness.
He distinguished it from illness. ‘Some labelled schizophrenics are mad by any
criterion that I know,’ he wrote. Yet, he went on, ‘some, in my experience, are
not [mad], but have been mystified into believing they are. And some have been
driven frantic as if they were mad. And even the mad ones are not necessarily
mad in the way they are said to be by those who label them.’
Esterson spent
countless hours with the families of diagnosed ‘schizophrenics’. ‘I sat,’ he
said, ‘with the water coming up to here’.
The key to his investigations was his Socratic refusal to take anything for
granted, and his Talmudic exploration of every perspective. His starting-point,
he said, was ‘sheer, bloody ignorance’.
Aaron Esterson
was born in Glasgow on 25
September 1923 , the only child of Julius (Yehuda) Esterson and
Katie née Cooper,
both immigrants from Eastern Europe . His
father had a draper’s shop, and was the principal of a Talmud Torah
College
Aaron’s father
died when he was two. His mother brought him for a time to London Mediterranean . This enabled him, on demobilisation, to
study medicine at Glasgow
University
He practised
for some years as a GP in England
and as a kibbutz doctor in Israel
While working
as a National Health Service psychiatrist, Esterson researched the families of
his ‘schizophrenic’ patients for Sanity,
Madness and the Family. He invented the phenomenological method of
interviewing family members in all possible combinations. He conducted all the
interviews himself. (Dr Laing sat in on one interview with each family.) But
during this time, the regional hospital board committee told him that, though
they had the highest regard for what he was doing, they felt his own best
interests would be served by a research rather than a clinical appointment. ‘In
other words,’ Esterson concluded, ‘I was given the standard psychiatric
treatment.’ In 1962 he entered private practice.
He eventually
published an extraordinary case-study of the family of ‘Sarah Danzig’, one of
his ‘schizophrenic’ hospital patients, as the first two-thirds of his book, The Leaves of Spring: A Study in the
Dialectics of Madness (1970). It is perhaps the greatest case-study since
Freud’s: both horrifying and humorous: a tapestry of taped excerpts of what the
Danzigs said to and about each other, interwoven with Esterson’s mordant
commentary: a paradigm for what he called the ‘next stage’ after Freud.
The dark-green
cover of this long out-of-print book shows a twig of spring leaves forming a
seven-branched Menorah: the symbol of the Judaism which the Danzigs, in their
different ways, practised. The parents’ compulsive activity met Freud’s
definition of religion as obsessional neurosis. But their daughter Sarah read the Bible! Her parents found this
bewildering enough. Worse, she read it to try to make sense of her own life.
Still worse, she applied what she read to them.
She discovered that ‘the Sabbath, the Memorial of Creation, the pious Jew was
required to celebrate in sexual joy’. She reproached her parents’ ‘degraded
sexuality’ by quoting Ezekiel on the withering of the leaves of spring. ‘For
the Danzigs…this was more than they could bear…. On the Day of Atonement…the
Danzigs sacrificed their daughter Sarah, sending her into the desolation of a
madhouse.’
In 1965
Esterson, with Laing and their colleague David Cooper, founded a charity, the
Philadelphia Association, to further their work. They set up a sanctuary at
Kingsley Hall in the East End of London for people who otherwise might have
been locked up in mental hospitals. But Esterson came to regard both Laing and
Cooper as frivolous and destructive: exemplars of the romantic, ‘charismatic’,
leadership he would criticise in The
Leaves of Spring. He endorsed Szasz’s critique of ‘anti-psychiatry’, and
wrote that that ideology had done ‘enormous damage’ to ‘the struggle against
coercive, traditional, psychiatry’. But he continued to respect some at least
of Laing’s writings, and saw the failure of the triumvirate as a catastrophe.
Esterson’s
work with families became the subject of a film, The Space between Words: Family, by Roger Graef. His later papers,
such as ‘Families, Breakdown and Psychiatry’, ‘The “Helping” Professions’ and
‘Orientation’, develop a scathing critique of the failure of the self-appointed
experts in ‘therapy’ to reach agreement – ‘or even intelligent disagreement’ –
on principles. A profound and moving lecture, ‘Judaism and Wholeness’, to the Leo Baeck
College
But all
Esterson’s papers are positive and constructive, reflecting his lifelong search
for truth and fundamental principles in psychotherapy and related disciplines.
These
principles, he insisted, were moral.
There could be no ‘value-free’ psychotherapy. Neither the ‘pleasure principle’
nor the ‘reality principle’, and certainly not ‘Gelassenheit’, was the touchstone. In unpublished writings he
explored what he called the ‘existential integrity principle’. As he saw it,
there could be no personal integration or wholeness without personal decency.
To Heidegger’s assertion that the essence of human existence is meditative, he
replied: ‘The essence of human existence is moral.’ Though Esterson was as
adept as anyone in helping people recognise their disavowed sexual phantasies,
he was a master of the art of helping them to acknowledge their disowned
ethical insights – and to discover unsuspected new ones.
Esterson
disparaged the proliferating practice of psychotherapy and counselling, now
made ‘respectable’ by university accreditation and institutional registration.
‘True psychotherapy,’ he once said, ‘is always anarchic.’ He saw most so-called ‘existential’ and
‘phenomenological’ psychotherapy as a travesty of the discipline he pioneered.
He trained a small number of hand-picked colleagues in his principles, with the
utmost rigour, often for many years.
His method of
research on ‘schizophrenia’ offered a social-phenomenological paradigm for work
in diverse fields. Although he said he had learned more from Freud than from
anyone else (runners-up were ‘Jung, Sartre, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and,’
he conceded, ‘a bit of Heidegger’), he inspired and encouraged historical
research on Freud’s case-studies leading to a radical reappraisal of the
foundations of psychoanalysis. A few years before his death he supervised
research on the techniques that Eichmann and his colleagues in the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst developed to deceive
and mystify their victims in the Holocaust. In all these researches, the issue
was to eschew jargon and muddle, and to ask the crucial question: who had done
what to whom?
Esterson was a
wise, sensitive, patient, tactful, humorous – but when necessary ruthlessly
honest – therapist, who inspired his associates with a deep sense of the
seriousness of their calling. He was a learned and devout Jew, who taught
Hebrew at the London Liberal Synagogue, and expounded Torah with psychological
and spiritual acumen, as in his searching shiur
(lesson) on Cain and Abel at Leo
Baeck College
Esterson was a
modest man. But he was sure of the historical significance of his contribution.
He was, he said, the successor of Freud. He said this with pride in his work,
but without egocentricity; as though he wanted to get clear what was the case,
for its own sake.
He had a first
heart attack in 1974; a heart bypass operation in 1984; and another attack in
1998, followed by insertion of a pacemaker. He also suffered for decades from
back problems. He would sometimes practise psychotherapy while lying on a
couch, with his client sitting in a chair or lying on a second couch.
On the other
hand, it was not unknown for him to pace up and down the room as he passionately
made a point in a therapy session.
On 13 April 1999 , after a bad
bout of flu, he was sharp, focussed and humorous in discussing the deficiencies
of Daseinsanalysis. On the evening of 14 April he told a friend he hoped to
live another ten years. Early next morning he felt ill, and asked his son to
call an ambulance. He had a cardiac arrest shortly after reaching the hospital.
The medical team was unable to resuscitate him.
He said, once,
he had no idea what happened when one died. He said, another time, he did not
believe death was the end.
Note: Apart from quotations from his writings and what he told a
friend the evening before he died, I have reported only what Aaron Esterson
said to me face-to-face, or in one instance (‘…the water coming up to here’) to a seminar of which I was a
member. A. S.
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