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In his letter to JAPA, Todd Essig makes some comments to “correct the record” of what he calls my “serious misrepresentation” of his work, as well as “a pair of counterproductive assumptions” in my recent paper (Moshtagh 2020, JAPA 68/2).
Essig starts his letter by mocking the paper as “Nahaleh Moshtagh's tale of an heroic journey to receive psychoanalytic training” and ends with the admonition “We should do better,” leaving me to wonder if there is something wrong with sharing one's tale in a psychoanalytic journal. In fact, psychoanalysis was the fruit of Freud's desire to listen to tales and hear their communications. Ever since, psychoanalysis has called us to open our horizons and go beyond ourselves to bear witness to another human being's journey, in our consulting room, on the screen, or in texts. Was my journey heroic? It definitely feels like that to me. Adam Phillips, in Becoming Freud: The Making of Psychoanalysis (2014), suggests that to Freud heroes are “men who defined their moment, not men struggling to assimilate to their societies; … a man who would face, in a new way, the facts of his own life” (p. 5). In fact, that's exactly what makes all distance candidates heroes. As I emphasize in my paper, we are facing life in a new way, passionately, courageously, and committed to our shared cause. This leads me to my second point.
While accusing me of serious misrepresentation of his work—by which he means not quoting the parts he prefers to highlight at the