Edward S. Tauber, M.D.

I ENTERED THE WHITE INSTITUTE in the fall of 1946 while still serving as an army neuropsychiatrist stationed in Fort Dix, New Jersey. As a candidate I was assigned to Edward Tauber for analysis. (Candidates were assigned in those days because of the shortage of training psychoanalysts)

I appeared in Ed's office one morning for the beginning of my analysis with him. The onset was turbulent, the analytic experience brief, and the ensuing relationship an ambivalent one. I was put off by Ed's shabby office and his brusk manner. He did not fit my notion of the medical professional. He seemed to shoot unsubstantiated ideas off the top of his head (or of mine). I was convinced that he was Germanic, hardly an admired trait at the time. It was only years later that I learned, to my surprise, that he had been born and raised in this country. His probing questions (the detailed inquiry?) sometimes puzzled, shocked or angered me, particularly when they were prefaced by hypotheses that seemed unwarranted and, indeed, at times, absurd to me. I later thought that I probably needed a pre-analytic experience before a psychoanalytic encounter with Ed Tauber. The G.I. Bill which paid for my psychoanalytic sessions became a bone of contention. I knew that he kept miscalculating the bills (I believe his fee at the time was $10/session) and he didn't accept my clarifications. He seemed to think it was my psychological problem and I thought that he couldn't understand simple arithmetical relations.

He came to believe I was an unsuitable patient and candidate and reported his belief to the Training Committee. My wife at-the-time went to see Ed and was outraged by his remarks about me. In any event I was reassigned to Hilde Bruch with whom I had a long, sometimes tumultuous, and perhaps a successful analysis.

I took a course with Ed and admired, perhaps in spite of myself, what he had to teach. Perhaps ironically, a crucial concept that I learned from him was that of the need t