An Interview of Donna Bassin

When I was presented with the opportunity of interviewing Donna Bassin about her artwork and psychoanalytic thinking I was immediately intrigued, excited and inspired to undertake the project for reasons of personal and professional necessity. About a decade ago I had been in individual supervision with Donna as part of my training at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and found the experience invaluable because she demonstrated a mastery of many different theories. As she aphoristically put it during our meeting, “I see myself situated within the left wing of the post-Freudian group and among the right wing of the relational group,” but she also conducted supervision with a free-ranging latitude. She often referred to art and ideas that she had gleaned from her work as an artist that lent a greater degree of depth and humanism to the experience of being with a patient. Nothing was considered verboten with Donna and she alternated between teaching me about the therapeutic use of the self, and providing an intellectually compelling view of her own thinking on gender, memorialization, and creativity. She was consistently open to many divergent theories without judging them. Moreover, in remaining in contact with Donna after the supervision had come to a close, I was often struck by the way conversations with her had a magical quality of being timeless, of encompassing several varieties of ideas, and a pleasant feeling that we were both happy being perpetual students. In the realm of aesthetics, her thinking treated the arts as shifting, fluid, and brimming with new insights and possibilities. We also had noted a parallel in our professional development. In addition to our passion as practicing psychoanalysts we had pursued our interest in the arts.

After we agreed to structure our project as an interview Donna was able to accept my invitation to come to my home in Park Slope. She greeted my various cats and my life partner, and then we relaxed with