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I THOUGHT I KNEW ROSE SPIEGEL. I thought I knew her well, and indeed, I spent a lot of time with her as student, supervisee, coresearcher, cowriter, and friend. I read almost everything she ever wrote that was available to me, not only in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, but in medicine and surgery, areas to which she made several significant contributions. But, for this article, an essay dedicated to her memory, I revisited some of her analytic writings on communication, and I was dazzled like a raw sophomore opening his mind to the craft of Keats. His “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” is a stunning piece that has seduced many a youth into deluded fantasies of a writing career. After all, who could resist the pull of a lustrous line like, “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken”?
I thought I knew Rose, her inordinate capacity to wonder, to be curious, her consummate eagerness to play with ideas and to offer them to others, but I was startled, refreshingly surprised, to find her thoughts still incisively astute and as stimulating as ever.
She could write with the grace and delicacy of an angel, with a master craftsman’s sense of interpersonal psychoanalysis, which pulsed down to the very marrow of her tiny bones and which she joyously introduced to a generation that followed her. A signal figure in the growth and maturity of the White Institute, she really understood and believed the stuff she got from Sullivan, Thompson, Fromm, and Fromm-Reichmann, who had been her eminent teachers.
She was rather shy, but the gift of the charismatic word was hers (the metaphor is Harold Bloom’s), and she truly knew the difference between that and the charismatic personality, to which she never aspired. It may have been that the abundant depth of that generative well of her creative