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And the last shall be first and the first last
This Commemorative Issue seems an appropriate place to review some aspects of the evolution of interpersonal psychoanalysis since my first meeting with Ruth Moulton in 1951, when I applied for candidacy to the William Alanson White Institute. It is, of course, a personal and impressionistic version with which surely not everyone will agree.
She had, I knew, a reputation as an “analyst's analyst,” especially for women. She was a great favorite of bright, young, educated women—analysts, professional women of all ilk, housewives, other analysts' wives and girlfriends. She was writing extensively about women's problems; to be an interpersonalist was, as I elaborate, pari passu, to be a feminist. But potential patients select analysts less for their prominence or reputation and rather more because they see the analyst as a role model: someone they feel had faced and successfully dealt with their kind of problems. She overwhelmingly met these criteria. She was married to an analytic colleague, had handsome and accomplished children from two marriages, wrote and taught extensively, lived a sophisticated, intellectual life. Also, she'd had the courage to leave her candidacy at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and follow her analyst, Clara Thompson, and Erich Fromm into exile. And as I discovered in my interview with her—and I can't remember how I learned this—she was a great admirer of the modernist and protofeminist, Virginia Woolf. Perhaps it's inconsequential, but she was, like the young Virginia Woolf, serenely beautiful. As one may deduce, I was smitten, and on my acceptance to candidacy