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ROBERTA HELD-WEISS DIED OCTOBER 4, 1985. She was 51 years old. She had had a short but distinguished career as a psychoanalyst, first as candidate at the William Alanson White Institute, then as graduate, supervising analyst and supervisor of psychotherapy, and as a member of the teaching faculty. She had joined the staff of This Journal recently, and her name appeared, for the first time, on the mast head of the October, 1985 issue. She once wrote (1985)1:
(What) we look for in psychoanalysis is not to be found while searching for historical events or causes, nor in recreating, restoring, or repairing the past. Neither would I locate it in a hermeneutic exegesis, a coherent and logical narrative. Instead I would search for it in our patients' struggle to give shape and meaning to their experience, in their efforts, however fragmented, unordered, incoherent, desultory, erratic or formless these efforts may be. Psychoanalytic truth … emerges in the analysis of the immediate analytic experience, in the observation and analysis of the participation. That is, it is in a reflection on its own process, in a self-consciousness of the emerging experience between the analyst and patient, continually being redefined … This is not to preclude the study of lives, or for that matter, the patient's experience of the past, as it gets actualized, articulated in, and filtered through the present (pp. 237–238).
She had many friends, the relationships with whom she nurtured, and kept intensely for many years, a loving family to whom she was devoted, and the respect of her classmates and teachers, who considered her a colleague. She is mourned by all.