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When I was asked to write this reminiscence of Helen Gediman, I realized that I remember her first as a very young woman, and as I do that, I recall my own youth as well, because Helen and I met as graduate students in 1956. Then my memory, like time-lapse photography, swiftly leaps ahead fifty, sixty or more years, to when Helen and I, happily, reconnected as adults—indeed, as seniors—and as psychoanalysts. Now that all of us are caught up in the sticky web created by the coronavirus, when life is threatened by invisible factors, when survival itself can be tenuous, it seems to me a good time not merely for reminiscence, but also for a look back on those years, to see how we have fared, and to explore how our lives and our psychoanalytic work have shaped the ways we confront the challenges of these dreadful times, for ourselves and for our patients. I propose doing that as the backdrop for a close look at Helen's professional life and at Helen as a person.
Helen sometimes tells people that she is a replacement child. Her parents had lost, and apparently never ceased to mourn, an older sister who died as a two-year-old. As a psychoanalyst, I think it was a good thing that Helen also ultimately had a younger sister, not quite two years her junior, so that the spotlight was not always solely on her; as a parent myself, I think that Helen's parents hit the jackpot when they got her. Helen was always precocious, always a winner. She was a magna cum laude graduate of Radcliffe/Harvard in 1952, when only 5% of the Radcliffe class went on to careers1; she picked up two more graduate degrees before winding up shortly thereafter at NYU's fabled Research Center for Mental Health, where we first met, and at the same time entered Bernie Kalinkowitz's equally fabled clinical psychology program. Helen's personal and professional lives have thus spanned some great years of the feminist movement. But Helen never needed the movement. She notes that