Ode to an Ever-Open Pathway to Listening and Learning

This essay shares reflections offered by the author when she moderated a “Meet the Author” panel with James T. McLaughlin at a June 2006 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, held in Washington, DC. Taking place only a few weeks before McLaughlin's death, the panel discussed his final work, The Healer's Bent: Solitude and Dialogue in the Clinical Encounter (2005), edited by William Cornell, which includes both new and some previously published writings, many reviewed here by the author. The author describes how she first met McLaughlin in 1980, when she sought him out after reading his as yet unpublished but soon-to-be classic paper, “Transference, Psychic Reality, and Countertransference,” with the thesis of which—challenging the implicit hierarchy in the prevailing view of the inner experience of analyst and of patient—she felt in deep resonance. McLaughlin became for her a model of someone who, in growing older, never stopped learning and rethinking and always remained open to another way of looking at a matter, and at himself. In moderating this panel, the author, along with the other speakers, tried to convey something of the extent to which his book offers a beautiful personal, historical, theoretical, and clinical exposition of continued learning anew.