Benjamin Wolstein

I Found Irwin Hirsch's Interview with Ben Wolstein enormously inspiring. For me, Wolstein expresses the fundamental spirit of psychoanalysis: what attracted me to psychoanalysis in the first place; what I was disappointed to find all too rare, once I joined the ranks of our profession; and what I consider a sine qua non for the future of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic discipline.

Clearly, Wolstein was way ahead of his time. Perhaps Clara Thompson was, too. Wolstein certainly emphasizes that he's standing on her shoulders; but I suspect him of affectionately overestimating her contribution to his own development. For example, his approach to the problem of self-disclosure by an analyst is apparently significantly different from Thompson's. Wolstein describes how Thompson would acknowledge the importance of her personal reactions and their influential presence within the treatment, but declined to make them a subject for candid, explicit discussion with her patient. Wolstein tells that he teased her about her reticence; discussing it years later, he conveys the same playful acceptance he must have shown originally. Nonetheless, Wolstein's good-natured objection to Thompson's stance of privacy constitutes an enormously consequential critique of the way she—and many other analysts of varying theoretical orientations—set up the ground rules of the analytic relationship: “Tell me what you really think about me, but I'm not going to tell you what I really think about me. You show me yours, but I'm not going to show you mine.”

Part of what impresses me as precocious about Wolstein, of course, can be attributed to the whole Sullivanian movement that was formative for him. We know very well that the contributions of the interpersonalists went unrecognized by “mainstream Freudians” for decades, despite the fact that the interpersonalists anticipated concerns that are only now coming into focus for their colleagues. (Hirsch, among others, has documented this history in detail.)