GREENACRE, PHYLLIS (1894-1989)

Phyllis Greenacre, American psychoanalyst and physician, was born May 3, 1894 in Chicago, Illinois, and died October 24, 1989 in Ossining, New York.

Greenacre was the fourth of seven children of Isaiah Thomas, a prominent lawyer, and Emma Russell. After graduating from Rush Medical College in Chicago, in 1916, she became an intern and resident at the Phipps Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore (Harley and Weil, 1990).

At the Phipps Clinic, where Greenacre remained for twelve years, she came into contact with the great Swiss-American psychiatrist, Adolf Meyer. Her exposure to Meyer reinforced her conviction of the inextricable link between biology and psychology. In 1932 she began psychoanalytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, graduating in 1937. In 1942 she was appointed a training analyst and henceforth served in a number of important institutional positions at the Institute.

During this period there was a growing influx of émigré analysts to the United States and particularly to New York. Greenacre was influenced by two of these émigrés, Heinz Hartmann and Ernst Kris. Her friendship with Kris was particularly significant because he encouraged her to value her unique analytic vision.

Greenacre's written contribution falls into three categories: clinical papers on development; psychoanalytic training and therapy; and studies of creativity. Her first paper, "The Predisposition to Anxiety" (1941), was criticized for its exploration of preverbal stages of development, and her argument that the roots of anxiety might predate the existence of the ego. This paper and its companion, "The Biological Economy of Birth" (1945), are also noteworthy because they announce her interest in memory and its vicissitudes. Greenacre's clinical work took as its point of departure her conviction of the importance of reconstruction in analytic work. She paid close attention to screen memories, believing them the path by which early preverbal experiences could be traced.

In the early 1950s Greenacre began writing on fetishism, and observed that fetishists had an especially mutable body image. The fact that descriptions of bodily changes were central to the writings of Lewis Carroll and Jonathan Swift led to the biographical study Swift and Carroll (1955). She wrote a number of papers on creativity, and proposed a theory of aggression, in The Childhood of the Artist (1957), as a manifestation of a positive developmental force; aggression as a positive response by the infant to the circumstances of its earliest experiences, both frustrating and gratifying.

Greenacre's contributions to psychoanalysis include original insights about the bodily and psychic experiences of the preverbal child, fetishism, and the creative individual. Of equal note is the fact that she presented this material in papers and books that are characterized by beautiful, evocative prose, in the service of imaginative and bold theoretical ideas and the sensitive interpretation of clinical material.

Nellie L. Thompson

See also: Allergy; As if personality, Identity; Imposter; Trauma of Birth, The .

Bibliography

Greenacre, Phyllis. (1941). The Predisposition to Anxiety. In Trauma, growth and personality (pp. 27-82). New York: W. W. Norton, 1952.

——. (1945). The Biological Economy of Birth. In Trauma, growth and personality (pp. 3-26). W. W. Norton, 1952.

——. (1955). Swift and Carroll, a psychoanalytic study of two lives. New York: International Universities Press.

——. (1957). The Childhood of the Artist: Libidinal Phase Development and Giftedness. In Emotional growth, psychoanalytic studies of the gifted and a great variety of other individuals (2 vols., p. 479-504). New York: International Universities Press.

Harley, Marjorie, and Weil, Annemarie. (1990). Phyllis Greenacre, M.D. (1894-1989). International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 71, 523-525.