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(Book by Rapaport, David)
Book by Rapaport, David
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David Rapaport was born on September 30, 1911 in Hungary, the son of Béla Rapaport, a merchant, and of Helen Balaban. As a youth he was a leader of the Hashomer Hatzair, a politically radical Zionist youth movement, well known for his fiery oratory and on occasion one step ahead of the police.
At eighteen Rapaport entered the University of Budapest, where he studied mathematics and physics. In 1938, Rapaport received a Ph. D. from the Royal Hungarian University.
In 1933 he and his wife joined their group's kibbutz in Palestine, where Rapaport worked as a surveyor. After two years they returned to Hungary, where Rapaport entered psychoanalysis for personal reasons and changed his field of study to psychology.
Soon thereafter he fled to America to escape the Nazi terror. After a brief period in New York City, he obtained a position at the Osawatomie State Hospital in Kansas, largely through the good offices of Lawrence S. Kubie, a New York psychoanalyst.
At Osawatomie, Rapaport at once began research on the effect of Metrazol convulsions, the shock therapy of the time; and with help from Frank Fremont-Smith of the Josiah Macy, Jr. , Foundation, he embarked on his first major theoretical study, Emotions and Memory (1942). In it he proposed a hierarchy of principles or ganizing the interrelationship of emotions and memory based on psychoanalytic, clinical and experimental psychological, and psychopathological data. Rapaport had met Karl Menninger, chief of the Menninger Clinic at Topeka, Kans. , in New York City.
In 1940 he accepted a position at the clinic, and soon became chief psychologist and director of psychology training as well as director of research. He organized a training program and projects on perception, hypnosis, infant development, and the selection of psychiatric residents, in addition to continuing his studies of human thinking by way of a battery of diagnostic psychological tests. Rapaport was able to show that though some diagnostic tests were especially useful in evaluating emotional functioning and others in evaluating intellectual functioning, all test responses shed light on both aspects of the personality.
His Diagnostic Psychological Testing (1945 - 1946), revised and condensed by Robert Holt, is still standard in the field. Rapaport gradually became concerned that his energies were being dissipated in administration when what he really wanted to do was scholarly work in psychoanalytic theory.
In 1948 he therefore accepted an opportunity to pursue such studies offered by Robert Knight, a former clinical director at the Menninger Clinic who had become the director of the Austin Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachussets At Riggs, Rapaport worked on systematizing psychoanalytic theory, in particular its metapsychology, the abstract level of theorizing in psychoanalysis, allegedly explanatory of its clinical theory.
Although he was unusual among psychoanalytic theorists in not being a practitioner, his participation in the clinical milieu and regular attendance at case conferences led to an infusion of clinical considerations into his work. After Organization and Pathology of Thought (1951), in which he presented and extensively annotated major papers in the field and then presented his formulation of the psychoanalytic theory of thinking, Rapport integrated the conceptual model of psychoanalysis and, later, the psychoanalytic theory of affect, ego psychology, developmental psychology, and motivation. He capped this work by The Structure of Psychoanalytic Theory (1959), which contains an extensive translation of psychoanalysis into the idiom of contemporary psychology. Indeed, none of his writings was confined by the parochial limits of psychoanalysis. He drew upon the work of the child psychologist Jean Piaget, upon ethology, and upon experimental psychology, both animal and human. While at Riggs, Rapaport wrote relatively little on clinical topics.
He also taught theory at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute. Though he lectured widely before psychoanalytic audiences and participated in the professional organizations of psychologists to some extent during the earlier part of his career in America, Rapaport essentially spent his time in his study. He was a founder of the Division of Clinical and Abnormal Psychology of the American Psychological Association, and in 1960 received its award for distinguished contribution to the field.
In 1952 he was offered the chair of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but declined. At about the same time Rapaport embarked on an ambitious experimental program designed to show, by the learning of word lists, how the psychoanalytic theory of attention cathexes and Freud's concept of consciousness as a sense organ could serve as the basis for a psychoanalytic theory of learning. Rapaport died in Stockbridge of a heart attack.
He made his more original contributions, in contrast with his systematization of theory, in his studies of states of consciousness, ego autonomy, the superego, and the psychoanalytic theory of activity and passivity. Though he made no effort to develop a "school, " Rapaport was enormously stimulating and a number of his students have achieved positions of prominence. He was a demanding teacher but drove no one harder than himself. His writings, which must be studied rather than simply read, are highly polished, spare, and intricately and carefully reasoned.
(Book by Rapaport, David)
His goal was to understand the nature of human thought, and to that end he regarded Freudian psychoanalytic theory, especially as its drive psychology became expanded by ego psychology into a general psychology, as the most fruitful approach. He asked how it is possible for man, influenced by the Freudian id, to come to a veridical grasp of external reality. The metaphor of a bridge is singularly apt for Rapaport - between philosophy and psychology, psychology and psychoanalysis, id psychology and ego psychology, where he followed Heinz Hartmann, and individual and social psychology, where he followed Erik H. Erikson. He was an outspoken foe of behaviorist psychology and associationist learning theory because of their neglect of intrapsychic affective and drive motivations. On the other hand he regarded cognitive structures and their development in the learning process as crucial to the understanding of human thought.
He was a man of wide-ranging interests, strong opinions, and powerful intellect.
On December 24, 1932, he married Elvira Strasser, who later became a professor of mathematics. They had two daughters.
