In an article in JAPA 64/3, Lawrence Friedman addresses a question he takes as his title: “Is There a Usable Heidegger for Psychoanalysts?” I am happy to report that this question has already been answered in my own work with a resounding “Yes!” Let me approach the question by first giving some background.

During the early and mid-1970s, George Atwood and I conducted a series of psychobiographical studies of the work and lives of four psychoanalytic theorists—Freud, Jung, Reich, and Rank—in each case showing how the experiential world of the theorist contributed to the shaping of his theory. In the final chapter of Faces in a Cloud (Stolorow and Atwood 1979), the book in which we collected these four studies, we concluded