My Literary Childhood Dream Fulfilled

I have always been a reader and I’ve always wanted to be a writer. My earliest lexical memory is, at the age of five, reading in The Yiddish Forward about the death of Sigmund Freud. I can even trace the beginning of my interest in becoming a psychoanalyst to that time. Books made up my world from a very early age. In my childhood and youth, I spent many hours absorbed in reading and studying at the Brooklyn Public Library in the Grand Army Plaza.

My father’s influence, and my identification with him, was literary. As a librarian in a unit of Leon Trotsky’s army during the Russian revolution, he was in charge of a cart carrying books most of the soldiers could not read. He loved Russian literature—Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy. He conveyed this love to me, hoping I would read the great Russians in the original. Though he did not succeed in teaching me Russian, I was able to read and write in Yiddish. Being bilingual increases one’s sensitivity to the nuances of language and serves a writer well. Isaac Metzker (1901-1984) was another person in my childhood who served as an ego ideal. Metzker was a Yiddish writer who became known for editing the “Bintel Brief,” a section in The Forward of giving advice to readers sending in letters—stories of their personal travails. Metzker is considered one of the most important Yiddish writers after the Holocaust. His novel Grandfather’s Acres (1953) was based on my mother’s family in Galacia,

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where he was a student of my grandfather.

Some Obstacles, Resistances, and “Roadblocks”

Though reading came naturally to me, writing did not. In fact, I wrote very little early in my career and thought that I had a writing block. I published only one paper during my psychiatric training, a paper about resistance to taking medication. The paper was based on my graduation thesis at Menninger, and it was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry. My writing inhibition, though a subject for my analysis, remained unresolved until several years after my analysis was completed. The cure came about with my son when he was in graduate school at the University of Rochester studying American history. I was asked to review a book written by Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World (1977), for the Psychoanalytic Quarterly.

Stephen and I spent a month on the project while we were together one summer in Maine. We spent much of that time in conversation, and out of that conversation came the review that we coauthored. We were encouraged in this enterprise by Stephen’s mother and my wife, Arlene, who was already a wonderful and successful published writer. My contribution to her work was providing titles. She wrote a book for children whose parents are divorcing, and she dedicated it to me for coming up with the title. Since then, Arlene and I have edited books and written papers together that we are both very proud of. In 1997, we co-authored Gambling, Death, and Violence: Hollywood Looks at Las Vegas.

Many are surprised when I tell them that I have writer’s block because I have published four volumes of my selected papers and a fifth volume is in preparation. In my writing I cast a wide net: clinical papers, theoretical papers, papers on psychoanalytic politics, and applied psychoanalytic papers. I feel best about the papers that include clinical experience, detailed accounts of psychoanalytic self-theory. It’s a crowded experience on the couch. My most recent paper has to do with self-revelation and self-disclosure. It includes verbatim process material and a response to this material from the patient himself.

From Pillar to Post

Being a clinician, teacher, and psychoanalytic communicator are the three pillars of my psychoanalytic identity. I think there is a relationship between the ability to write well and the ability to teach well. When I teach I encourage my students to think about

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writing as conveying their ideas to others. Two of my former students have become my coauthors. Being the midwife for psychoanalytic authors and providing a platform for their contributions is very important to me. I founded The American Psychoanalyst (TAP) in 1989 and I was editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA) from 1994 to 2003. I am also the book review editor of TAP and the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY) bulletin, positions which I share with Arlene.

About nine years ago I started a publishing company, International Psychoanalytic Books (IP Books), which has more than 120 books into print. In addition to books on psychoanalysis, we publish memoirs, novels, non-fiction, and poetry. Our books have been reviewed widely, one in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). The poetry books are all by psychoanalysts. I am quite pleased to have established a platform for poetry and fiction written by psychoanalysts. I don’t think another platform like this exists in publishing. Some of my own poems were published in a volume edited by Salman Akhtar, Between Hours: A Collection of Poems by Psychoanalysts (2011). I take more pride in my poetry than any other of my writing.

Words into Action—Beyond My Wildest Dreams

I am also proud of my organizational and political contributions, writing with the purpose to bring about democratic change in psychoanalytic institutions. Many agree that I have had an impact on the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA). Writing for me has always been associated with activism. Again, I think my self-identification as an activist goes back to my father the revolutionary. My aim has always been to make a difference in the lives of my patients, students, and in the organizations that I am part of. It is up to others to judge to what extent I have been successful.

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