Speaking about and with Dr. Arlene Kramer Richards

In writing, in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy at its best, our words convey a voice-a deeply personal voice, a voice that both listens and speaks from one's own body to the body of another…to take residence, to come more alive, to awaken, to challenge, to cherish one another.

Arlene Kramer Richards, a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), the Contemporary Freudian Society, and the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR), and the subject of this column, is a psychoanalyst with a powerful voice. Psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and patients listen to and reflect upon what she has to say. I know her as a teacher, consultant, mentor, collaborator, and an admired friend.

At one conference that I attended, where Arlene was a panelist-presenter, the moderator announced her by saying that she needed no introduction. While that might have been the case, she deserves one. So, before my interview with her, I shall do that. But first, a look into how she works. Here is Dr. Arlene Kramer Richards' response to Sandra Cohen's (2020) essay, “The Trauma of Having No Voice,” where Cohen spiritedly calls for psychoanalysts and others to help girls and women not only to develop their voices but to stand up for women in their fight against abuse:

Women want a voice. Just like men want a voice. We all want to be in control of our own lives. Living in a social world limits the extent to which we can do that. Other people's rights and wishes clash with our own. Other people's needs sometimes come first. No one can get it all. But we can all at least have the right to say what we want without being shamed for saying it. And we can all have the right to say what we are afraid of without having shame about that. …The psychoanalytic ideal of speaking one's own truth, suppressing nothing, and respecting where one's own mind wanders, encourages analysands to speak out in other situations just as they do in the analytic space. And the a