As the International co-editor of eForum with Jane Lewis, I’m proud to present a new column that features interviews with members of the IAPSP community, some of whom are very well known and some less so. In these interviews I hope to provide lively glimpses into the many different ways that IAPSP members live and work. The first interview with Dr. Allen Siegel from Chicago is very timely insofar as the next IAPSP International Conference will be held in Antalya, Turkey. The interview focuses on his remarkable mentoring relationship with a Turkish group that inspired the new IAPSP Affiliates Program. Many groups from all over the world now participate in this program.

I’m very interested in learning whom you would like me to feature in future columns. Please send your comments and suggestions to me at annetterichard@cooptel.qc.ca.

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Interview with Allen Siegel, M.D.

Annette: Allen, the new IAPSP Affiliate program was inspired by your mentoring relationship with the Turkish group. As president of the Study Group on Intersubjectivity in Montreal, Canada, one of the beneficiaries of this new program, I’m eager to find out more about you and your experiences as mentor. Could you tell us the story of how your 12-year long relationship with the Turkish group at the Anatolia Center started?

Allen: Thanks Annette for your interest in our experience. My Turkish friends and I are happy to share what we have created with you. You ask about the Anatolia Center, but you need to know that in the beginning there was no Center. There was a group of 30 mental health people, counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists. They were all unhappy with the training they had received in relation to the theories and practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and wanted a more contemporary approach.

At that time, Yavuz Erten was the able leader of the group. Yavuz contacted Ernie Wolf on the Self Psychology Online Bulletin Board, inviting him to teach self psychology to his group in Istanbul. I remember seeing that note on the Bulletin Board and wished someone would ask me to come to a fascinating place to teach. One week later Ernie called to ask me if I wanted to go to Istanbul to teach for a week. “Wow,” I thought. “My wish had been granted.”

Of course I accepted the invitation and Renee and I prepared a week’s course that included some initial orienting theory and then clinical material. Renee presented material from her child cases. I presented adult work. Initially I was anxious about this new assignment, especially since I speak no Turkish and would be using a simultaneous translator.

When we landed in Istanbul, Yavuz met us at the airport and took us to our hotel in the old city. Istanbul, a city of 16 million people rising up hillsides along the Bosporus instantly reminded me of San Francisco, my previous favorite city in the world. As we drove through the city it seemed to teem with people in continual motion. New sights, sounds, smells came from all directions. It was exciting, even a bit overwhelming. That night Yavuz and his wife Meral took us to a wonderful fish restaurant on the Bosporus and the next morning we began our weeklong seminar.

At the meeting there were many new people with names that sounded strange to my English-oriented ear. I eventually had to ask people to write their names for me so that I could see what their names looked like. The morning went well. We began at 9:00 and were to end at noon. The group, with customary Turkish hospitality, invited us to lunch. We, as good guests, could not decline despite the fact that we had made some other arrangements. At lunch the group was lively, full of questions about the morning’s material, and bursting with questions about many things psychoanalytic. We didn’t get up from the table until 3:30, too late to see any of the sights we had planned to visit. The pattern of morning seminar with long lunch afterward continued the entire week. We saw none of Istanbul but saw lots of the group. An immediate bond developed and at week’s end the group asked if we could continue our interchange via telephone conference on an every-6-week basis. I agreed and we proceeded that way for the rest of the year. That was our beginning.

Annette: What an exciting beginning! Your story brought me right there to Istanbul with you and the group. It sounds like what you were offering was just what they were looking for. We will talk more of how this collaboration evolved, but I’m curious to know what it was like to teach clinicians from a culture very different from yours, and to communicate with them through a translator.

Allen: Initially working with a translator was a weird experience. I had a simultaneous translator at our first meeting. Usually simultaneous translators sit in a sound proof booth in the back of the room. They translate into a microphone and the audience has earphones to hear the translation. The speaker has no direct contact with the translator. My experience was different. The group did not have resources for a soundproof booth so my translator sat next to me and translated as I went along. I began to speak and she stated her translation about 10 seconds after I began. It was strange. At first I didn’t quite know what was happening and wanted to tell her to stop talking while I was speaking. Of course I didn’t do that and eventually became accustomed to the experience. When people in the group spoke my translator quietly translated what they were saying for me. She was so good at what she was doing that before too long I had the fleeting experience that I could speak and understand Turkish.

As far as teaching clinicians from a culture different from my own is concerned, I found that the etiquette and meanings of many things differed from my own experiences. However, I also found that my self-psychological understanding of the nature of people, by which I mean their sensitivity to matters of self-esteem, pride, humiliation, connectedness to others, and the import of the wholeness of the self, cut across the cultural divide. In fact, using the explanatory power of self-psychological ideas to understand life in a different culture has profoundly strengthened my conviction about the usefulness of self psychology in understanding the many arenas of human endeavor, including art, religion, commerce, history, literature, and all the rest.

Annette: Yes, I can see how this experience confirms how, seen through the self-psychological lens, we are all more human than otherwise. So, if I may come back to your first year of work with the Turkish group, you said you had telephone conferences with them every 6 weeks. You recently told members of the IAPSP Affiliate program that when a group of people eager to learn comes in contact with a mentor interested in teaching this particular group, they improvise their own music. What music came out of those conferences and where did it lead you and them?

Allen: As self-psychologists we are all sensitized to the interactive nature of human contact. The music of the Turks and me was clearly an interactive process. Their interest and vitality enthused me and I’m certain my interest and enthusiasm vitalized the group. Basically, I listened for what the group’s educational needs were and responded in ways I thought would promote their growth and education. We did not have a master plan, overview, or any sense of where we were headed. Our compass was simply a meeting-by- meeting unfolding. As I look back, I see it now as having been much like a therapeutic process although I did not have that perspective at the time. I had no idea where things would lead.

To my surprise I found that the training experiences of many had often been traumatic. As one would expect with traumatized people, although I did not fully appreciate that situation at the time, group members were reticent to voice their ideas, questions, or learning needs. Their previous teachers had been demanding, humiliating, and belittling. The group members were taken aback at my friendliness, openness, and enjoyment in teaching. Our early music consisted of my gently encouraging participation by creating an ambiance in which not knowing something was welcomed rather than demeaned. I tried to create a space where ignorance was welcome and safe. No question was outlandish. Every question and comment became a “teaching moment.” Nothing was ridiculous.

I told them Kohut, who they wanted to study, was difficult to read. I shared my own difficulties reading him and told how, on my 7th attempt at Analysis of the Self, I finally decided out of desperation to draw pictures of what Kohut described in his ¾ page, nearly unintelligible sentences. My American openness, friendliness, and desire to create a safe learning/teaching ambiance probably was the first music they heard they heard from me. It surpassed the content of what we discussed. The first music I heard from them was their eagerness to learn but their traumatized fear of exposing themselves. At first they found safety in anonymity of their numbers.

Another early piece of music was the strange sound of Turkish, a language not related to Latin. While my translator had helped me enjoy the illusion that I could speak and understand Turkish, the reality was that, since it isn’t a Latin language, Turkish held an entirely new music for me. Most poignant was the names of our people. I had never heard such, to my ear, strange sounding names. When I asked for their names I could make no sense of what they said. Being a visual learner I finally asked people to spell their names for me on paper. Once I could see their names, the music followed naturally.

They too had trouble with the music of my name. Not because Allen was so strange sounding to them, but because I invited them to address me simply as Allen, not as Dr. Siegel and not as Allen Bey a form of Turkish address I later learned was formal but friendly.

Then there was the clinical music. In the beginning of our relationship we were listening to two very different themes. Mine was the music heard from the expectable self-psychological “bottom up” position of empathic immersion. Theirs, while being innately sensitive and naturally empathic people, was the schooled “top down,” all knowing position they had been taught in their training. Some were even taught never to ask a patient a question because that implies they did not know something and the not-knowing would cause their patient to lose confidence in them and to feel unsafe.

Our first pedagogic task was to get on the same musical page. To do this I needed clinical material but what they presented was so heavily weighted in the “top down” direction that it was difficult to use it for teaching purposes. Instead I looked for emotional experiences that we could share and discuss. I found these shared emotional moments in films that were available in both English and Turkish. We watched “Muriel’s Wedding,” “Leaving Las Vegas,” “Harold and Maude,” “Fried Green Tomatoes,” and “Ordinary People.” There might have been a few more but I don’t recall them at this moment. These were intensely evocative films that enabled me to demonstrate emotional motivations and responses, viewed from a self psychological perspective. Our initial discussions occurred every 6 weeks in a 2 hours Sunday conference call in which all our members were located in one room in Istanbul, where speakers were attached to their phone, and I was in my home office in Chicago. These experiences, along with assorted readings, helped us get through the “top-down” assumptive versus “bottom up” empathic listening that had created our initial clinical cacophony.

Annette: This is so fascinating! I’m sure this process transformed both you and them. Before I ask you in what ways, would you tell us what other teaching methodologies you developed with them along the way? I read a paper on eSupervision which I think originated with this group.

Allen: The paper on eSupervision entitled, “eSupervision: Something New Under the Sun,” grew out of work I did with a German analyst living in rural Bavaria. It came a few years before my work with Turkey. It gave me confidence that psychodynamic education was possible in other than face-to-face situations. Previously, the prevailing bias concerning psychotherapeutic pedagogy was that such a personal experience as supervision could only happen when the two people were in the same room. My German experience was an epistolary supervision, conducted through weekly communications initially faxed and later emailed.

In that experiment I learned that the strongly held bias that it was impossible to teach such an interpersonal skill as psychotherapy in anything other than a direct, immediate, in person setting truly was a bias. In that situation, I established the initial understanding with my supervisee that I did not know whether it was actually possible to conduct supervision via the mail but that I was willing to try it on the condition that either of us could call a halt to our effort if the work seemed either impossible or not helpful. I must admit that I was anxious over the attempt since the bias was so strong. We happily discovered, however, that it was possible to conduct a serious, long-term supervision in epistolary form without having met each other face to face. We learned that affect belonging to both patient and therapist could be adequately conveyed in letters. That should have been no surprise since people have poignantly communicated in letters for hundreds of years.

The success of my German experience piqued my interest in distance education. I discovered that I enjoyed helping “geographically disadvantaged” people have access to the theoretical and clinical information for which they yearned but to which they had no economically realistic access. My German experience opened a new teaching vista for me. Through it, among other things, I learned the value of entering an unknown teaching situation with an experimental attitude and that is how I approached my Turkish experience.

After our initial meeting I had no idea what the Turks and I were going to do, what might be possible from a distance of 6000 miles, and where it might lead. It turned out to be a wonderful adventure and the Turks were marvelous companions on the journey. They were tolerant of my missteps and appreciative of anything I was able to give them. Together we created an attitude of “let’s try it and we’ll see how it works.” No promises were ever made other than the implied promise of getting through obstacles until something worked.

Our teaching methodologies evolved with the development of technology, our goal being the closest approximation of direct communication we could create. We began with the 2- hour phone conferences every 6 weeks, and 8 years later, evolved to a weekly, audio-video online that had a capacity to post documents on the screen. That capacity enabled participants to read an instructor’s notes along with the instructor as he or she taught. This capacity was especially useful for people for whom English was not a first language.
We also had an archival capacity so that anyone who missed a class could play it back at a later date. The software had a simple, user-friendly interface but was very complex and sophisticated inside.

In addition to technological advances we also brought guest teachers to Turkey each year. I wanted the group to have access to the multiple perspectives of self psychology. I also wanted them to have first hand exposure to some of our valued theorists and clinicians. In summary, out methodology evolved along a “fill the current need” and a “whatever makes sense” axis.

Annette: I understand better now how your mentoring and teaching experience with the Turkish group, your openness to evolving with them and creating new learning possibilities despite the geographical and cultural distances inspired the IAPSP Affiliate Program for other distant groups, like my own French speaking community here in Montreal. What you brought us through this program, I didn’t think possible, and I’m very grateful. But, coming back to you, how would you describe the changes which took place for them, in Turkey, and for yourself, through those years?

Allen: This is probably the most difficult question to answer because I can’t speak for the Turks and I haven’t actually articulated for myself what impact this experience had upon me.

I’ll make a guess about the Turks on two levels. One is a personal level, the other a pedagogic level, although they really can’t be separated so cleanly. On the personal level the Turks were exposed to a new teaching style, very different from the “top down,” often humiliating experiences they had with teachers before their “American experience.” They discovered that one could learn and teach in an atmosphere of friendship and collegiality without worry and fear that if they didn’t “get it” they would be shamed. This experience, and our repeated contact over many years made it possible for us to become friends. The matter of friendship is a major element of my experience. The friendship of my new Turkish friends has become an important part of my life that also exists on two levels. One is the level of friendship, pure and simple. The other has been the opportunity to be exposed, in an intimate way, to Islam, a culture about which I previously was ignorant. And within Islam I have been exposed to Sufism and the story of Mevlana Jal-al-ladin Rumi and his poetry. In this transcultural adventure I have found great similarities between Islam and Judaism that have opened a new window of understanding for me, which stands to reason since we are historical cousins.

At the level of a teaching adventure I have learned not to be put off by the myths and biases voiced by a majority. Those biases seem to be based more on a wish to maintain what has always been done rather upon than data obtained through direct experience.

As I said earlier, my Turkish friends have turned out to be wonderful partners in the 12 years adventure upon which we all embarked. I thank them for what they have given me.

Annette: Thank you Allen for this wonderful story. Our visit to Turkey next October for the next IAPSP Conference will be one happy outcome of it.