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I am not at all inclined to write a eulogy for Bryce, that is, to write only of what was good about him. Eulogies are half-truths, and consequently have a ring of falseness to them. Bryce had no use for lies, half or whole. I think what he would have much preferred to a eulogy would be an attempt to offer an idea or two associated with his analytic passions that the reader might think about for awhile. But before getting to the ideas themselves, a few words about the way the two of us met and came to work together and got to know one another seem a necessary context.
In 1979, I took a parttime job teaching the psychiatric residents at Herrick Hospital during their year of inpatient work. In my first meeting with the five or six members of the teaching and administrative staff of the residency program, Bryce introduced himself and said that he had heard that I was going to begin a case conference for the residents and nursing staff on the inpatient service, and asked if he could attend, (a full four years out of residency at the time) said that that would be alright with me. For the subsequent 21 years, he and I taught a weekly conference together (10-12 months of every year). It would make a good story if I were to say that working with Bryce soon opened my eyes to psychoanalytic vistas I had never before imagined. What actually occurred was that he spoke a great deal about regression, weakness of the ego, and bodily fluids. It was not that I disagreed with him — I simply didn't understand what he was talking about. This state of affairs lasted for years.
He was a far better student than I was, and soaked up what I had to teach about the ideas I had been studying and hearing discussed and utilized during the year I had spent at the Tavistock Clinic three years earlier. Bryce was initially quite biased and skeptical about anything Kleinian. He had not studied her work, and seemed to have adopted the dismissive American psychoanalytic stance toward Klein and all else (e