Our Literature

Our literature, a portion of which has recently come under my stewardship, plays many important roles in the ongoing life of every psychoanalyst. We become analysts in part by learning our literature. It is one way of teaching our profession. Our literature is our history, populated by a parade of heroes and villains.

We would be hard pressed to find another field in which this one's or that one's paper plays as crucial a role in setting in motion the neophyte's conceptual thinking and new identity formation. Our literature links us to Freud, to one another, and to what we will eventually understand and do. And it invariably does so in a manner that illuminates the huge divide between the elegant abstractness of our analytic words and the crude, confusing, even worrisome nature of our clinical work.

Our literature quickly becomes part of our ideal; beloved, feared, and despised. And the characters, the way we identify them with their papers—Hartmann's paper about this, Winnicott's paper about that. I am reminded here of a scene that took place at the Waldorf twenty or so years ago, then as now the temple of art deco splendor we consider the appropriate setting for our midwinter thoughts. During the discussion of a presentation long since forgotten, a contentious debate erupted on the merits and perils of the therapeutic alliance concept. The back-and-forth took the usual twists and turns, eventually settling on the conviction that the truth, or at least enlightenment, hinged on Sterba's paper on the fate of the ego in analytic therapy. What did Sterba mean? Was he referring to the metaphorical or the actual, the volitional or the unconscious, the temporary or the sustained? Temperatures rose, the battle widened, pedigrees were invoked. What Sterba meant in that classic paper was the key! From the back of the room, an elderly man approached the microphone and announced, “I am Richard Sterba and what I meant was the following.” A ghost had arisen: we were mesmerized. It