The Ineffable Articulated

In a World-War-II-Vintage Book titled See Here, Private Hargrove there is a passage that has always delighted me. It deals with a sergeant's effort to elicit from a new recruit the knowledge of and compliance with a numbered order, whereby any untoward occurrence requires calling for the officer of the day. It goes something like this: “Suppose you see a battleship coming over that dune; what are you going to do?” Without batting an eyelash the private replies, “I'll take a torpedo and sink it.” “And where, may I ask, would you find that torpedo?” inquires the sergeant testily. “In the same place that you found your goddam battleship,” says the private glowingly.

Irreverent though it may sound, this memory sprang to my mind, and I do not believe it is irrelevant to the things I was preparing to say in reflective response and appreciative appraisal of Irwin Hirsch's painstaking interview of Benjamin Wolstein. This is because, among these things, I consider the anxiety of influence; the creative use of immediate experience; the trust in something that one knows when it happens, despite the difficulty in defining it; the presence of the absent until the latter arrives; the unique as an affirmation of something at the exclusion of anything else; the intimations of “immaculate perception” and objectless love; and the belief in a sine qua non for psychoanalysis leading to a most exacting but elusive legacy. If there had been any questions as to where the Wolstein opus stands, or how the man saw himself, their impossibility and possibilities live on.

It is of interest that the interview begins with questions about influences, and “strong influences” at that. Though it is implicit in the response, I was intrigued that the fact that Clara Thompson was Wolstein's analyst and not a supervisor does not get clarified till a bit later. It made me wonder, for the umpteenth time, how we conceive of influences in psychoanalytic training and practice. Do we have any inclinations, let a