Eulogy For Rose Spiegel, M.D.

MY ACQUAINTANCE WITH ROSE goes back to the early days of the Institute, when classes were still held at the Croydon, a hotel on West 86th Street, and to my earliest days as a candidate at the Institute. Rose was actually the first person that I met after having been accepted as a candidate. It was never clear to me whether Rose had appointed herself as a welcoming committee, or whether that had been her assignment. Needless to say, her interest in acquainting me with the “rules and regulations” was a welcome antidote to whatever misgivings I may have had at that time about starting analytic training. Rose introduced me to the important people at the Institute. And although she talked freely and with pride about her medical career—she had graduated medical school with honors—she did not mention anything about her earlier life and background. It was as if for her, life had started once she had become acquainted with psychoanalysis. Clearly her main interest had become psychoanalysis and her excitement about matters psychoanalytic was palpable and contagious. In a way, she adopted the role of a big sister with me; we sat together at meetings in which she was always an active and lively participant.

After I graduated from training I lost contact with Rose until a good twenty years later. We both were busy, and it took until 1962 for our interests to begin to converge. That was the year of the first meeting of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies, an organization that was being founded jointly by the White Institute, Fromm’s Mexican institute, the reconstituted German analytic group, and a Vienna-based institute. Rose attended the first meeting and her indomitable curiosity soon extended to questioning the role of analysis in former Nazi Germany. How did analysts who did not have to leave Germany, but had to disavow Freud, manage to conduct analyses, when they were always under the potential scrutiny of an informer? Were such analyses indeed possible?

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