How I Became An Analyst

Early in 1955, on the advice of some senior analytic colleagues, the Bibrings, I decided to spend a brief sabbatical in London, working with Anna Freud and participating in the activities of the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic (as the Anna Freud Centre was then called). It was my first real exposure to child development and child analysis and it was a pivotal experience that affected the way I have thought about and practised analysis ever since, throughout all of these years.

But in order to retrace the path that led me there, I shall have to go back over sixty years, to my student days. Actually, before I turned to medicine I was more interested in other branches of science. When I was sixteen years old I built my own short-wave receiver and transmitter and became a ham radio operator. This bent towards electronics motivated me to enter the engineering school at Cornell University in 1931 with the intention of becoming an electrical engineer, but I was especially drawn to experimental physics. After my first year of engineering I even took a summer course in modern experimental physics, and carried out cloud chamber experiments to determine the charge on an electron. Had I followed this interest, perhaps I should have become a physicist, and possibly in due course a nuclear physicist. However, I was enjoying my engineering studies and it didn't occur to me then that I might have an academic and research career.

But those were depression years, and it seemed unlikely that I could make a sufficient livelihood as an electrical engineer. So, after about two years studying engineering, I returned to an earlier interest in medicine, and transferred to the College of Arts and Sciences to complete the pre-medical requirements. Probably if it had not been for the limited employment opportunities in industry in those times, I should have remained in engineering, with strong interests in other directions.

To turn to those ‘other directions’: from early years I had bee