Allan Frosch: Portrait of a Clinician

This is a portrait of Allan Frosch, a psychoanalyst trained and active for years at Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), who died on October 28, 2016 after a ten-month struggle with lung cancer. In addition to being a psychoanalyst, training analyst, and supervisor, he was twice president of IPTAR, and a highly respected teacher. His achievements as president and his record as teacher are worthy of detailed discussion but will not be treated here; rather, I will try to convey a sense of Allan Frosch, the clinician. To do this, I will look at his work with four supervisees, his reflections on psychoanalysis in his journal articles, and some moments from my five-year analytic treatment with him. To try to create a unified portrait out of these various materials, my method will be non-linear, moving freely among these three sources of information so as to invite resonances to emerge. The goal is a portrait that may convey something of the way Allan Frosch worked and what he thought about it. By the end, I hope to show from several perspectives Allan's gift for apprehending others as they are, with reference to his thoughts about analytic love, the necessary difficulty of the analytic task, and the intensity of the analytic encounter.

This portrait will leave out his personal life, of which I know two facts only: that he was born and raised in the Bronx, and that before becoming a psychoanalyst, he was for a time an actor.

I first met Allan in 2001 as his student in the first-year development course at IPTAR, “Adolescence.” I remember him mainly listening very closely to all of our questions and my being very comfortable in his class. An indication of my unconstrained feeling with him is that I once made a joke that caused an explosion of laughter in the group. In retrospect, I now think that all of the various ways our relationship evolved were in some sense forecast in that first feeling of being comfortable with him.

A candidate was being supervis