Remembrances of Jim Grotstein

The only place to start in talking about Jim Grotstein is to say, Jim was Jim. I've never met anyone remotely like him. Borges said of his father, “My father was an intelligent man, and like all intelligent men, he was a kind man.” Jim was both an intelligent man and a kind man. He was much else. I've known Jim for 35 years. In the course of those years, I thought I knew about Jim's childhood in Ohio quite well. But only last December, when we were speaking on the phone one Sunday, did he tell me, “You know, English is my second language, don't you?” I said, genuinely puzzled, “No, I didn't know. What was your first language?” He left just the amount of time Jack Benny would have before saying, “Baby talk.…” Such an important insight into language and human intimacy, conveyed as only as Jim could.

This led to another thought Jim had been having, no doubt about Bion's O. I said something or other, and we went on like that for some time, as we always did. Jim never aged, tired, lost his memory — we lived timelessly, there would always be time to continue talking, that is, up until a few years ago, when he began to tire and live with one illness after the other. During the past two or three years, we talked by phone almost every Sunday. After about a half-hour on the phone, he'd tell me Sue, his wife of 50 years, was calling, but he'd always add, “We'll talk next weekend,” which we always did. He and I knew that by saying, “Sue's calling,” he was telling me that he was now too tired to talk. But, in a sense, it was true: Sue was calling. Jim could not have existed without Sue, and he knew it. She loved him constantly and unobtrusively, keeping Jim safely connected to the world outside of psychoanalysis.

I met Jim in a way that only could have happened with him. Jim was Jim. I was a 29-year-old psychiatrist in San Francisco who had held my first job for less than a year; Jim was a famous analyst — a god, from my perspective — whose papers I was amazed by. Who but Jim woul