Talking to Patients and Talking to Colleagues: Telling it as it is, Gobbledygook, and Scientific Discourse1

This is not a scientific paper written according to the standards I learned something about long ago. Perhaps I can call it an essay—I have something to say and I am trying to write it informally.

The essay was invented by Montaigne in the 16th century—his essays were short, simple, narrow, and personal. I am saying something about this topic because in recent years I have found it more and more difficult to understand what analysts have been writing about, since so many have written less and less about what patients say to them and what they say to patients.

Halfway through the analysis I had with Klein, my two professors, Meyer of Hopkins and Campbell of Harvard, were in London and interviewed her. Campbell wrote me later saying that he felt what she said was outlandish and would be called crazy by many people but that he had enough respect for her and her work to wonder what time would tell and whether in the future people would think about her career as a special type of individual psychopathology, or as that of a discoverer, which would make every reader wonder why they could not pay attention to what she was saying and what children showed or said to her.

Often in my career, both with patients and with colleagues, they have said they did not understand what I said, even when I repeated it. So often, eventually, they would say that what I had said was too simple to believe.