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THE EXPERIENCE OF TALKING TO AN OLD FRIEND while wearing a different hat—the interviewer’s—had an effect that did not surprise me. The fragrance of her humorous wisdom trailed after me after these conversations. The syntax of that fragrance hinted at a kind of war, yet the tone was easy, familiar. It spoke of ritual, of exchanges repeated in different forms. It reaffirmed the need to take responsibility for what one says, when one says it, in what context, and to whom. To me (I had been carefully institute-trained to reject the overused commonplaces of psychoanalytic language) it spoke of trying to experience psychoanalytic work as a living reality, of trying to reach out to others in love and understanding, and of not taking the risk of turning them away through castigation. I asked myself, is it the accumulated wisdom of age that allows Dr. Szalita to exert her beneficial influence on others? Or is there the additional and crucial contribution of her character and—to anticipate her own words—the way in which she integrated all these elements to develop her personality? Even a quotation of Aristotle that I found on the subject doesn’t render justice to the uniqueness of one individual like Dr. Szalita. Aristotle remarks on the widespread belief that “a young man of practical wisdom cannot be found. The cause is that such wisdom is concerned not only with universals but with particulars, which become familiar from experience, but a young man has no experience, for it is the length of time that gives experience” (Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 6, ch. 8). The extension of this Aristotelian proposition appears also to be self-evident: wisdom and experience are not synonymous; one can be experienced without being wise. Some people, however, seem to be endowed with a capacity to observe reality from an early age and that