Tribute to Paul Lippmann

I imagine I speak for many readers when I say that the world without Paul Lippmann in it is a less interesting one, and certainly a less interested one. Paul brought his inquisitive and passionate nature to everything he did—family, work with patients, relationships, professional meetings, and even his illness. When he asked you how you were doing, he really meant it and wanted the details. And the questions he posed! “What kinds of things are the two of you fighting about now?” “What’s the world like without your father in it?” And, to my husband Gary the very first time he met him, “How’s the sex?” Paul allowed for everything in conversation, an opening up of space that invited all feelings and experiences. I never left a time with Paul without being enlivened by his questions and curiosity.

He spoke with such candor about living and about dying. Sometimes it seemed he was trying to make this final truth more bearable by first speaking of it himself, a last gift to us all. He would say “my cancer” or “You know I’m dying.” In the months that he knew were his last, Paul never stopped writing, as he worked on “Dreamerie: A Little Book on Dreams,” his cherished project. In an unpublished draft of this book, he addresses the reader with the promise of what is to come:

In what follows, I will bring to you a series of ideas about dreams in our times. I will discuss the subversive aspect of dreams, a personal history with dreams, the idea of our turning into machines and dreams as “the canary in the mind,” the significance of forgetting dreams, the life of a wolf dream, the role of shamanism, the history and fate of dreams in psychoanalysis, the effect of changes in night, the effect of changes in sleep, dreams as rehearsal

Address correspondence to Patricia R. Everett, Ph.D., 96 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, MA 01002. E-mail:

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for death and all things, dreams and the transformation to film, dreams and lighting up the night, the use of the analyt