The Life and Work of Robert S. Wallerstein: A Conversation
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Dr. Wallerstein, in speaking with Virginia Hunter (1994), you said that you had come to the United States with your father from Germany at a very young age. Can you tell me about that period in your life?
Well, I was a two-year-old when I came to America. I was born in 1921, during the terrible post-World War I period when inflation destroyed Germany economically for several years. My father was a resident in medicine at the Charité Krankenhaus in Berlin and had intended to stay in Germany, but his money was wiped out by the inflation. He had two possibilities for work: to go to Persia and become the court physician to the governor of one of the provinces (who was a patient of his in Germany) and his family, who were related to the Shah, which my father declined because of travel difficulties—a several-day camel ride from Tehran to the provincial capital, which my father deemed too arduous for his wife and one-year-old son—or to try to come to the United States.
He decided to answer a New York Times newspaper ad for a physician's assistant in gastroenterology; and once hired, he moved to New York. Within a year, he had saved enough money to bring me and my mother to join him. Of course, German was my language at that time (I was two years old), and I continued to speak German at home until I entered kindergarten. [End Page 617]
At that time there was no preschool but one could enter kindergarten at age three and would have to stay until age six. So when I started kindergarten at three, I told my parents, "From now on we speak English around here!" But German continued to be my parents' language at home, especially with friends who had come from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Everything was very formal; you would never use first names even with friends you had known for thirty years. It was always "Herr Doktor" or "Frau Doktor." I read recently of a woman who said about her upbringing in similar circles in America, "When I was a little girl, all my mother's friends had the same first name. It was 'Mrs.'" I lived in that kind of quite formal German household.
I was very involved with school. In New York's public schools at that time, good students were allowed to skip grades, so I literally skipped five grades through elementary and high school, and I graduated from high school at age fifteen and a half. My mother, who felt I was too young to begin college, sent me to live with her bachelor brother, a physician in Mexico City, for one year (1936-37).
What was your experience like in Mexico?
In those days, Mexico City had only one million people, not the present twenty million, and it was very different from what it is today. We had a pleasant home in a quiet residential area near Lomas de Chapultepec. You could look out of the window and there was no smog, so you could always see the volcanoes. I had a wonderful time there, and I studied art and Spanish.
What brought you from medicine to psychiatry and then to psychoanalysis?
My father expected me to go to medical school and talked me out of my inclinations toward engineering and architecture, [End Page 618] on the basis that in those days it was very difficult for Jewish students to get decent jobs in those professions. If you went into medicine, you could be an independent practitioner. So when I returned to New York, I applied to just a few undergraduate colleges with the idea of going on to medical school. Although I wanted to go to Harvard and was accepted there, the scholarship that they offered wasn't enough, so I went to Columbia College and could live at home. After graduating from college, I continued at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, starting...
