Remembering Bert Karon

I first encountered Bert Karon in the fall of 1989, when I entered graduate school at Michigan State University. Bert was an unassuming yet intriguing figure in the department, known for his investment in clinical work and in humanizing the psychotherapy of schizophrenia. At that point, I didn't know much about psychoanalysis, only that many of the students in the program had become affiliated with the local psychoanalytic group and that many of the psychoanalysts there were highly valued and sought after as clinical supervisors in the program.

Bert taught the thematic apperception test (TAT) section of our initial assessment class, so I was introduced early on to his particular teaching style, which drew upon personal anecdotes from his clinical work and an enthusiasm for deep immersion into whatever material was under investigation. I was easily enticed into Bert's way of reading the TAT stories, as he invited us to slow down, resonate with, and think through the texts as we encountered them. In contrast to much of academic reading, where we hurry through, looking for the gist, the point, the salient fact to remember and organize our understanding of the material, here, we were invited to work slowly and deliberately from the individual bits of data, to engage with them and see where they led us. This was a different and profoundly personal way of finding meaning that appealed to the part of me that could readily become absorbed in art, nature, literature, or film; the more associative part that could easily seem unwelcome in a clinical psychology program.

But here, this was precisely what was demanded, and I was soon rapt in the absorbing task of reading deeply, word by word, line by line, through the TAT stories, slowing down sufficiently to be able to allow possible meanings, nuances, subtleties, and associations to register. As the class worked together, reading each word and associating to the words and the meanings as they evolved through our efforts, a story