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Accommodating to Covid, Paul Wachtel and I met online on a late January morning. In ways, the meeting reminded me of one of our lunchtime meetings at New York's Café Fiorello over the years. Paul and I are friends, having met at first when I consulted with him about my growing interest in psychotherapy integration “from the analytic side,” in the mid-eighties.
Via Zoom, I started by asking Paul how he found his way to psychology. He chose to begin with his past as—of all things—an undergraduate physics major at Columbia University. For three years while earning A's in math and science courses, he also experienced a growing sense that physics was not really what he wanted to devote his life to. But he did not have a clear sense of what alternative would really be his passion, and at the end of his third year at college, a sort of panic set in as he struggled to find his true vocation. He used the metaphor of a Ouija board to describe going to the college bookstore one day, almost in an altered state of consciousness, and just seeing what section he was “drawn to.” Thankfully for our field, it was Psychology.
At graduate school at Yale, Paul was exposed to the thinking of many analysts, including his mentor, Sidney Blatt; George Mahl, who taught psychoanalytic theory both at Yale and the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute; Roy Schafer and Ernst Prelinger, with whom he had an intensive year-long seminar on psychoanalytic theory and practice; and a range of psychoanalytic psychiatrists at his internship at the Yale Psychiatric Institute. He found these psychoanalytic ideas, as well as the broader field of clinical psychology fascinating, but also felt a kind of “intellectual claustrophobia” that called on him to diversify his studies through outside study groups centering on literature, sociology, and social criticism. Intellectual confinement does not suit Paul.
As a psychoanalytic candidate at NYU Postdoc, Paul welcomed the range of views he was exposed to in t