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I FIRST MET ED TAUBER AS a supervisor while I was being analyzed by Clara Thompson in the early 1950's. We hit it off immediately as I was most interested in probing my own countertransference issues in my work with very difficult patients. The symposium he contributed to, along with Clara Thompson and Ralph Crowley, confirmed my excitement about his talent in probing, albeit roughly at times, to the core of an issue. Even when working
with a psychotic paranoid woman with severe obsessive and compulsive symptoms, he would enliven and brighten the painful drudgery with some novel perspective that would provoke a fresh engagement in this difficult and frustrating labor.
This passion for novelty prompted him to push his enquiries always to the frontiers of scientific knowledge in fields far from clinical psychoanalysis. We competed with each other in first references to relevant news in the Sigma Xi Quarterly, Nature, Science and the usual psychiatric and psychoanalytic journals. We shared an enthusiasm for David Rioch of whom Ed was somewhat envious; and, of course, for Erich Fromm to whom Ed was fiercely loyal to the very end of Fromm's life.
When Aserinsky and Kleitman first announced their discovery of the REM response in the sleep cycle in association with dreaming sleep, we were both so excited that we flew to Chicago, and arranged with Bill Offenkrantz to stay up all night in the sleep lab, and see for ourselves. This led us to correspond and meet with others, and join in the founding of the Society for the Psychophysiological Study of Sleep.
We saw the source of novel ideas, of imaginative creating, and of productive interpersonal growth in a relationship that had to tap the underlying psychophysiological sources of interpersonal mental and language behavior. A boo