Edward S. Tauber, M.D.

I FIRST MET ED TAUBER WHEN, in 1951, I applied as a candidate to the William Alanson White Institute. Ed was one of the training analysts who interviewed me. My first impression, as I sat in his waiting room, was that it was hardly prepossessing. It was an extraordinary jumble of old furniture, dusty books, what looked like Hungarian throw rugs, and— mirabile dictu —innumerable pictures and statues of horses and dressage riders! These last items delighted and relieved me. I had just returned from Army service in Berlin where, due to the constraints imposed by the airlift, my primary activity seemed to have become a passionate interest in riding horses.

I thought—at last, an analyst for whom (to paraphrase Freud) sometimes a horse is only a horse! So I went into analysis with Ed. Of course, it turned out that a horse is hardly ever a horse, but for all that, the analysis went rather well. Some time after its termination, we became fast friends; or as fast friends as one can be with someone who knows a great deal more about you than you know about him.

In those early days, Ed and I, along with Erwin Singer and Ben Wolstein and our respective families, shared summers at the Cape. Despite the vicissitudes of time, these friendships endured over the years, until Erwin's death. Later, I had occasion to spend time with Ed alone at various meetings, the last, by some strange circularity, taking place in Berlin, where he and I had, in a manner of speaking, started.

Ed was a bon vivant. He loved good food, good cigars and good company. He was an opera buff, with the usual propensity of that breed of singing arias off-key at the drop of a hat. He was also formidably smart, with what he thought was a disarming modesty about his special knowledgeabilities; namely in dream neurophysiology and pure science. Ed always assumed that you, the listener, knew all about the Döppler shift or the latest findings in REM sleep. If he knew, surely you must know. Oddly enough, tha