The Richards with the Online Forum Sponsor a Book Party

Analysts, professors, writers, and artists convened January 5 at the Manhattan home of Arnold Richards and Arlene Kramer Richards who generously had the event professionally catered. The Richards and most of the group had come to know each other in the course of lively exchanges on the Psychohistory Forum’s online discussion group. They met in person to celebrate three recent publications: Encounters with Loneliness: Only the Lonely (eds. Arlene Richards, Lucille Spira, and Arthur S. Lynch, 2013), Psychoanalysis: Listening to Understand (Arlene Richards, 2013), and Emily Kuriloff’s Contemporary Psychoanalysis and The Legacy of the Third Reich (2014). These book covers, among others, were exhibited on a coffee table in the living room of the 45^th floor penthouse apartment. The publisher of the first two, International Psychoanalytic Books, is an imprint that Arnold Richards began in 2006 and is devoted to clinical, theoretical, and applied psychoanalysis.

Writers and essayists spoke of their work. The anthology on loneliness grew out of an ongoing discussion group started by Richards and Spira at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s annual meetings. Themes of solitude and social isolation so common in human experience have rarely been elaborated in the psychoanalytic literature in such breadth. Remarkable are the book’s use of

Page 502

contributions to the subject from social science, literature, and art, including the work of Samuel Beckett, Frida Kahlo, and Egon Schiele. An essay on Petro Almodóvar’s film The Skin I Live In examines a narrative in which a scientist, whose beloved wife dies in a car accident when her skin is incinerated, invents an artificial skin: flawless, unfeeling, and impervious.

Arlene Richards recounted a moment of epiphany when her research led her to discover that Marcel Proust’s episode of taste nostalgia catalyzed by the famed madeleine, a traditional finger cake from northeastern France, was also a childhood memory of Proust with his own mother who routinely read him a story in which the mother of the main character was also named Madeline. This character eventually becomes a motherly lover and marries her adopted son. In her collected papers, Richards describes longing as the experience of fantasied motion, of propelling oneself toward the object of desire.

Author Emily Kuriloff spoke passionately of her many interviews with Martin Bergmann and recounted one vignette Otto Kernberg told her of a day when he was 10 years old. During Hitler’s invasion, the Nazis stopped Kernberg and his mother on a busy promenade in Vienna and made his mother kneel and wash the street.

From the central spiral staircase, Arnold Richards queried the crowd: “How many psychoanalytic schools are there here?” After prolonged pause, Richards himself retorted, “I have brought together at least six groups of Jews—which is saying a lot.” Among the attendees were members of the Psychohistory Forum, New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute, Division 39 of the American Psychological Association, the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, and the William Alanson White Institute. Toasts were given from glasses of white wine and Prosecco.

The evening recalled the culture of salon life in Europe so important to intellectuals of the 17th and 18th centuries and crucial to the education of women. Such a tradition highlights the historical relationship of society to stockings. Nicknamed Bas-bleus (“Blue stockings”) for the blue worsted leg coverings worn by

Page 503

women at these get-togethers, as compared to black silk stockings, this appellation conveyed how the female activities of embroidery were being superseded by intellect pursuits. It is fitting that a psychoanalytically-informed assembly evokes the literary salon of the Enlightenment, which people enjoyed in informal attire, in casual and practical country clothing, what was then thought of as “society in undress.”

The gathering resounded with the music of the legendary Jim Hall, an American guitarist, arranger, and composer (1930-2013). In tribute, Dr. Ken Fuchsman compiled selections from various periods of his work, including the song “Goodbye My Love,” written in collaboration with his life companion, psychoanalyst Jane Hall.

Editor’s Note: At the book party, Molly Castelloe received the Psychohistory Forum’s Sidney Halpern Award for Outstanding Contributions to Psychohistory. This monetary award certificate reads “For Creating and Moderating a Vital Online Psychohistorical Discussion Group and Furthering our Discipline through the Medium of Documentary Film.” This prize is named for the late Temple University psychohistorian and scholar of the ancient world, Sidney Halpern (1927-1994), whose colleagues and family funded it.

Page 504