The Ninth Street Center What People Say About Us

East Village Counselor
by Seymour Shubin

Because it's a cheap place to live, growing numbers of struggling artists -- and hordes of youngsters out to "make the hippie scene" -- have been moving into a squalor-ridden section of Manhattan's Lower East Side, known as the East Village. There on East 6th Street, on the first floor of an old building that would be a typical New York City brownstone if it hadn't been painted white, is a facility that was set up a couple of years ago to deal with the problems of "creative and unconventional" people. Indeed, the facility -- the Village Counseling Service -- is quite unconventional itself. It's run by a psychoanalyst, Dr. Paul Rosenfels, who no longer practices psychiatry.

Why "counseling" and not psychiatry? Dr. Rosenfels, a tall, strong-featured man in his late 50's, who'd greeted me -- as he would his patients, later that day -- with rolled-up shirt sleeves and no tie, said, "You see, I'm licensed to practice medicine in Illinois but not here, I simply haven't applied for a license here. I really don't want one."

He then went on to give me some of his background. "I'm a diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, and the Institute for Psychoanalysis, in Chicago. In 1946, I became an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago and was there two years, when I left to go into private practice. However, I found myself becoming more and more dissatisfied with classical psychiatry. Finally, after three years in practice, I decided that I had to 'draw back' and rethink a lot of things that I'd taken for granted, but that I couldn't do this while I was still, you know, responsible for patients' welfare. So I gave up my practice and moved to California. But there I found that I really didn't know what else to do to earn a living. So I took a job as chief psychiatrist in the Reception Guidance Center in the Department of Corrections, which is a receiving prison in Southern California."

He stayed for a year, then finally went ahead with his original plan to "draw back" from the practice of psychiatry. This lasted for about four years, during which time he made his living working at such jobs as cook and printer. He also wrote a book -- Psychology and Civilization -- the first of two he's written. (The second is Love and Power, the Psychology of Interpersonal Creativity.)

"I was very happy during those years -- they were very creative years for me. After that period I decided it was time to come back to professional life."

He held several positions before finally starting the counseling service -- for instance, he was chief of the outpatient clinic at Forest Hospital, in Illinois, and worked for the federal government for a number of years in the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation.

"I realize, of course, that what I've done and what I am doing is very hard for the average professional man to understand. I've even had people ask me if I'm on dope or something. The simple fact is, I'm doing my own thing, and I've had to go my own way to do it. And I'm a happy man doing it."

"But why don't you want a license to practice psychiatry here?"

"I don't feel like going through the bother of taking exams when I don't need a license to give the kind of service I am giving. Furthermore, if I'm to reach the people I want to reach, people who are, well, unorthodox, I have to have this kind of informal practice. They wouldn't put up with it, or me, any other way. Then, too, I don't want the restrictions that come with having a licensed medical practice. For example, I couldn't advertise."

The Village Counseling Service places an occasional ad in a weekly, "underground" newspaper, published in the East Village, that carries in its "personal" columns such notices as: "Attractive upper middle-class couple desires company of broadminded pretty female to spend a pleasurable evening," or, "Married woman, dissatisfied with insufficient sexual outlet, sought by married man in same predicament. . . ." The Village Counseling Service's ad, a dignified one, offers help with such problems as "drug addiction, psychosexual difficulties, creative productivity, and marital conflicts," and describes the facility's goal as helping people reach "a better adaptation to life within whatever human framework the individual has chosen as his own."

"It's a horrible newspaper," Dr. Rosenfels said, "but the ad helps me get to the kind of people I couldn't get to any other way, people who ordinarily wouldn't be caught dead in a psychiatrist's office. And from what a lot of them tell me, it's the sentence about helping them adapt to whatever framework they've chosen, that helps bring them in."

He charges nothing for the first visit. "I don't know when they first come in whether I'm going to be able to help them or not, and I don't feel like charging for that. I'm most successful with creative people, people who paint, who write, who have at least a touch of the hippie -- the flexible people of the world. I simply wouldn't try to treat the vice-president of the First National Bank. It isn't that I couldn't understand him but, in order to grow, people have to accept certain implications. Growing is quite a revolutionary thing. You don't know where it's going to come out. It might mean leaving your job, your wife; you might not be able to afford the luxuries you've committed your whole life to having."

His minimum fee, he continued, is $10 -- which, with very few exceptions, is what most of his patients pay.

"They're also free to cancel an appointment whenever they want to. In other words, I don't come on with this professional thing where, you know, I'm the most important person in the world and if you don't keep your appointment, or have forgotten about it, you pay for it. That's my way of showing respect for them as human beings."

What is his approach in counseling? "My main emphasis -- incidentally, I work with individuals, not groups -- is always on what's happening today in a person's life. I don't give them any intellectualized gobbledygook about their id, ego and superego, which I feel are useless terms. I also don't accept the classical transference kind of relationship to a therapist. I simply don't accept the dependence. I insist on treating patients like adults. Moreover, I approach each person without any preconceived notions of how he should behave. Now, a lot of therapists talk this way, But I really live it."

"How, for instance, do you work with a homosexual? You probably see a lot of them here."

"I simply try to show them how to make their lives more meaningful. Homosexuals, particularly in the kind of atmosphere created in this East Village world, are generally a very promiscuous lot. They can't have a meaningful relationship with other people. And that's the real reason they come here."

"How about dope addicts? How do you handle them?

"Well, the addict who's on 'hard' drugs must get off them before I'll attempt to work with him; there are too many ways he can cop out through the addiction. In any event, I've had very little luck with hard-core addicts. But take the young people -- by the way, most of the people I see are between 19 and 24 -- who tell me they're using LSD. They don't get an Establishment response from me -- 'You've got to cut it out, it can make you psychotic and affect your genes' -- things like that. But it's interesting how I do get them off it just the same. It's a matter of getting them to see that the drugs are not going to do for them what they think they're going to do, that the real way to develop, to 'expand one's consciousness' is by growing emotionally. In fact, I don't put the primary emphasis on the drug itself, but on helping the person grow. Once he does grow, he just naturally gets himself off it.

"You know, the word psychedelic, unfortunately, has become attached to the drug scene. Actually, its a very good word and means such things as a state of great mental calm and intense perception of the senses. All of this, however, can be acquired in a much more powerful way psychologically than through drugs. I mean by going 'flexible' inside, by being willing to receive new 'information' so that you can just taste, smell or feel something in a new way. However, to be able to do this often requires you to make great changes in your life."

"Coming from an 'unconventional' person, that doesn't sound very unconventional to me."

He smiled, "I often have to laugh at myself because I am like radical and flexible, and yet my patients always go toward the abiding values of life. They tend to give up drugs, they tend to give up promiscuity, they tend to get an image of a 'true, mated union' between partners. I try to demonstrate to them that man is essentially a mated animal.

"You know, it's not that hard to get people to be moral if they have a motivation for it. And though this may sound the most conventional of all, a good motivation is to care about the welfare of other people, and to really want to be loved."

-- reprinted from SK&F Psychiatric Reporter, November 1968