ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT human capacities is the ability to recognize decent people, or moral people, or intelligent people, or people wiser than we are. In writing here, I am trying to convey the capacity for recognition and concern that I feel this very loving and impractical friend of mine taught me to have and to expand in my own sensibility. My friend Joe was the most modern of psychoanalysts. His kind of modernity, composed on the one hand of a quiet cool patience and on the other of a passionate working relationship with his patients, hardly exists today in this post-modern informationalized and pragmatic society in which we live. Contemporary