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An extraordinarily imaginative interpreter of human experience, Jim Grotstein touched many minds and hearts in the psychoanalytic community — locally and internationally In his writings and speaking engagements, Jim richly elucidated human experience as continually fomented by the creative unconscious.
You cannot paraphrase Jim, or sum him up — or even edit him, for that matter (some of us tried!). Too much gets lost in translation — the dazzling associative leaps he would make as he commandeered the Classics, Greek and Roman mythology, the succession of kings and queens of Scotland for the past 500 years, the elegance of Klein's theory, or the genius of Bion to shed light on the varieties of the human spirit.
Jim's psychoanalytic thinking was constantly evolving. Titles of his papers frequently include words such as “Re-examining,” “Further considerations on …,” “A reassessment of…,” “A revised psychoanalytic conception of…,” and “The evolving and shifting trends in psychoanalysis.…” A devout believer that, fundamentally, people hunger to come into being truthfully, Jim was especially dedicated to reeling back into the fold those psychoanalytic outcasts labeled as “unanalyzable.” Over the years he created a body of work reaching out to those patients who were diagnosed with “terminal” Negative Therapeutic Reaction. He calls these patients “castaway infants” and “orphans of ‘O,’” asking that we heed their “call of the wild.”
Jim has published over 260 papers and 12 books, a few of these co-edited. In his later books — the kind one keeps returning to — he expands the psychoanalytic universe. In Who Is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream? A Study of Psychic Presences , Jim extends the idea of dreaming into a very personal unconscious conversation one has “between oneself” to give visual and narrative shape to psychic pain. We are the dreamer who dreams and the audience who watches and understands our dreams. With A Beam of Intense Darkness: Wilfred Bion's Legacy to Psychoan