Tributes1

I AM GREATLY HONORED TO HAVE been invited to talk about Erwin Singer's contributions to psychoanalysis. I had, of course, over the years read his papers, his book and book chapters, always impressed by his cogency and amused and touched by his loyalty to his friends. Erwin hardly ever wrote a paper without a series of laudatory references to his friends' publications. I owe to Erwin the heady, and, alas, never-to-be-recaptured, experience of finding myself in reference as, "as Freud, Jung, Fromm and Levenson have said…"

Over the years, we talked often about theoretical and clinical considerations, and, particularly in the early years, when the White Institute maintained a Summer Palace at Provincetown, Erwin, Ed Tauber, Ben Wolstein and I spent many pleasant afternoons up to our ears in sand and stimulating ideas. It was a time of heady rebellion and strong personalities, and Erwin with his Viennese flamboyance and diaspora-inspired background often seemed to me more the contemporary of my mentors than of my own somewhat more colorless, managerial generation. Nevertheless, we became fast friends and stayed friends over a thirty-year period. Time and familiarity breed a certain… nonchalance, and it was only when I was able to review Erwin's total oeuvre, that I realized how coherent and vital his work was, how sympathetic to my own perspectives, and how vividly it reflected his personality and style.

If a leopard wrote metapsychology, it would be about spots, and when Erwin wrote, it was about the impact of the therapist and his personality on the treatment. He was, as we all knew him, a Rabelaisian figure, somewhat larger than life in both his virtues