A Reflective Appraisal

READING THIS LIVELY and unselfconscious interview made me wish I were the proverbial fly on the wall while it was taking place, eavesdropping, as it were, on a private yet meant-to-become-public, serious exchange with a touch of repartee. Not only did Dr. Issacharoff’s experience remind me of a similar one I had with Dr. Szalita some twenty years ago, but, as with many an analytic session, the flow of the question and answer continuity, the wonderment at what was pursued in preference to something else, the choice of sequence or change, made me ponder the exercise of our preferences, conscious or unconscious, in the process of our inquiry and the achievement of its purpose. It is, then, with a sense of privilege and a feeling of humility that I shall attempt what I hope to be a resonant response to the multifaceted ways in which the topic of the conversations between the two participants was addressed. In so doing, I am mindful of one of Dr. Szalita’s basic tenets, a painfully and painstakingly reached one, that “every communication has an intention, content, form, and effect.” I am also mindful of what a colleague of yore, Francis Braceland, once said: “You see, old men have trouble getting folks to listen to them, but readers are captive,” at least as they go on reading. Also, as Dr. Issacharoff warned, there is “a need to take responsibility for what you say, when you say it, in what context, and to whom.”

Experience and responsibility are two words and themes recursively recurrent in my reading of the interviews. In terms of the former, two things come to mind. One is Aldous Huxley’s statement that “Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.” The other, in a lighter vein but still to the point, is a recollection of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (who facilitated the shift of Szalita to psychoanalysis) participating in a holiday skit at Chestnut Lodge in which she sang, to the tune of “Oh, Christmas Tree! Oh, Christmas Tree!” that,