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When Jo Lang called to extend this invitation, my mind turned first toward how it is a wonderful invitation indeed. I have been fortunate to speak in a variety of psychoanalytic settings, but this invitation comes with particular meaning in that it comes from students as they celebrate the culmination of many years of study and hard, humbling work. So, I thank you sincerely for the honor.
But immediately my mind then went to the following thought: wait a minute, I am too young! I laughed as I linked that thought with the feeling of sudden age that I experience each time, every time I watch gray hair fall to the floor as the barber buzzes. I laughed again when I considered that only in this profession could a fifty-something feel too young. Then I thought, hey, it is the 50th anniversary, so maybe I am part of the theme. Or I figured, well, Martin Bergman must have said no, or perhaps you are waiting to invite him back next year when he will be 100. I figured as well that Phil Bromberg must be out of town at a Grand Man conference, and that Adrienne Harris had likely stormed the gates to be there too.
So here you are, stuck with me. What could I possibly have to say beyond annoying you yet further with my narcissistic nattering about arthritis, jowls, and gout? So I immediately turned to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tony Kushner, and David Foster Wallace, who are known for their famous commencement addresses (among other things). Big mistake. Not only did I feel green as in young, but as in envy. I implore you to read them. You must read Emerson as he addressed the Harvard class of 1837, and made his case for the necessity of scholarship and contemplation: “Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty.” You must read Foster Wallace as he addressed the Kenyon College class of 2005, and leaned into his exquisite attunement to the interstitial to point out that freedom is found not in the big moments but in the between moments of carin