Philip M. Bromberg (1931–2020). Trauma, dissociation, and the multiple self

Abstract

That intimacy and depth of relatedness were so precious to Philip Bromberg, even his central truth and purpose, is perhaps an irony, because he was a shy person, not given to demonstrativeness, certainly not an extrovert. But his privacy and reserve, however prominent they may have been to those who encountered him in person, are probably much less evident to anyone who knows the man only from his work. In what follows I attend mainly to Bromberg's ideas, which have been, and continue to be, among the most influential bodies of work written by any interpersonal/relational analyst. But the heart of the man, this sense he always had of the profound affective possibilities for human relatedness, deserves precedence in considering both his life and his work. Psychoanalytic training, early clinical and theoretical commitments The understanding of Bromberg's views calls for some background about the psychoanalytic world from which he emerged, and to which he contributed. He was born in Brooklyn in 1931 and grew up there with an imaginative mother who told him stories she made up on the spot. He tells us she was "a poet by nature" (Greif and Livingston 2013, 323). Was it perhaps she who inspired his love for both the deeply felt life and the poetry and fiction he read throughout his life and wove so expressively and effectively into his writings? After college and then a brief period studying for a doctorate in English literature, he became a psychologist, and then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he trained as a psychoanalyst at the William Alanson White Institute (WAWI) in New York City, drawn there by the ideas of Sullivan (1940, 1953, 1954, 1956), whose thinking was central to WAWI. From the beginning, Bromberg believed that problems in living did not derive from intrapsychic conflict but from the kinds of destructive interpersonal events that he eventually came to refer to as "relational trauma". Sullivan himself seldom, if ever, used the word "trauma", but as Bromberg became more and more deeply immersed in the clinical study of trauma, he understood Sullivan's (1940, 1953, 1954, 1956) theory of how human living goes awry to be a kind of trauma theory. Sullivan himself died 20 years before Bromberg arrived at WAWI, but three of the analysts who supervised Bromberg's work at WAWI, all of whom were serious students of Sullivan's thinking, had particularly deep influences on him: Edgar Levenson, Earl Witenberg and David Schechter. Witenberg, the Director of WAWI at that time, was acknowledged as a highly talented clinician. Schechter was a brilliant developmentalist whose work spanned interpersonal and Freudian