Viola Bernard and the Analysis of "Alice Conrad": A Case Study in the History of Intimacy

Alice Conrad, a New York social worker who was engaged in multiple sexual relationships with men and with women during the 1930s and 1940s, baffled her analyst, the renowned psychiatrist Viola Bernard. After two months in analysis, Bernard was clearly frustrated in her attempts to navigate Conrad's short but cluttered personal history of intimate relationships. She wrote how her "patient has been to a bewildering number of places just in one night. So much so that it is impossible even to keep them in mind for analyst. Apparently she had M.M., the client whom she feels the threat of a personal relationship with, the B.'s, 'Bill,' J., all in one evening."¹

Bernard's confusion while trying to keep pace with Conrad's many emotional entanglements, let alone attempting to draw some significant meaning from them, was not for want of trying on Bernard's part. Bernard, the consummate medical professional who saw Conrad daily five times a week from 1940 to 1945, compiled copious and detailed notes from each session. The analyst charted her patient's confidences with great care, considerable empathy, and a meticulous attention to the detail presented before her, listening attentively to Conrad's frustrations and dilemmas, which were, seemingly, a part of each relationship Conrad entered into, whether it concerned affection for a man or a woman or, as was typically the case, for both at the same time.

The case notes of Viola Bernard offer a rare and intriguing insight into the methods and practices of a psychoanalyst dealing with a young and articulate professional single woman as she explored her sexual desires, often through a roller coaster of confusion, anxiety, conflict, and uncertainty. Conrad's narrative is necessarily mediated by, and constructed through, Bernard's perspective as an analyst. We only have her interpretation of the analysis available to us. Nonetheless, although Conrad's testimony is refracted through Bernard's psychoanalytic gaze, she provides a rich glimpse of the intimate and interior life of a young woman grappling with her sexual desires during the mid-twentieth century.

Conrad was explicit and forthright in expressing her emotions and desires. She spoke openly and freely in the language of sexual modernity, that is, of female sexual desire outside of marriage or prior to it.² While her comments were wide-ranging throughout the period of her analysis, the main topics that are covered can be broadly summarized in four categories: emotions (pleasure, desire, love); the body and its pleasures (orgasm, masturbation); culture and society (family, marriage, birth control, "alternative" partnerships); and transference and countertransference within the analytic relationship. As a social worker, she was comfortable with the terminology and methodology of psychoanalysis, although she had firm views about Freudian theory, and early in the analysis she made it clear that "she has an antipathy for orthodox Freudianism."³ This places Conrad within the functional school of thought within social work practice, which argued against the orthodox Freudian method of the long-term treatment of patients and favored short-term, set, and immediate goals.

Conrad's analyst, Viola Bernard (1907-98), with whom she formed a lifelong bond, was herself a formidable figure whose political and social views put her outside of the conventional profile of an analyst practicing during the mid-twentieth century. A progressive for her time, Bernard was a fervent champion of expanding psychiatry for the benefit of social causes. Her career was devoted to applying psychoanalytic approaches to dealing with social problems. Bernard became involved in the new and burgeoning field of community psychiatry, and her commitment to making it available to the poor led her to establish the country's first low-fee psychoanalytic clinic at Columbia University.

Born in New York City in 1907, Bernard graduated in medicine in 1936 from Cornell University. She undertook psychiatric studies at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and postgraduate work in psychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, from where she graduated in 1942. Bernard was certified as a psychoanalyst in 1945 by the American Psychoanalytic...