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Congratulations to the graduates. You have worked very hard to get here, and some of you are beginning a journey that will immerse you more deeply into the world of psychoanalysis. Many of you have pursued psychoanalytic psychotherapy training seeking to deepen your work with children, adolescents, and adults. You bring a breadth of interests, experience, and diversity to your search. You come to us with a wide lens of passionate, varied interests driven by your own singular quests, pursuing questions that come from your own depths. There is a personal, active process of desiring that has brought each of you here, a striving, in search of something that is uniquely your own, a fire that I hope will continue to burn in you and drive you to increasingly alive and joyful pursuits.
I am honored to have been invited to be here today. I thank those who invited me as well as those who generously took the time to talk with me about their experiences in teaching this year's graduates. It was very helpful for me to have an imagined picture of you, the graduates, in my mind as I wrote this speech.
I would like to focus on three interconnected spheres of our lives as psychoanalytic clinicians: first, the practice of psychoanalytic clinical work; second, the learning and teaching of psychoanalytic theory; and third, the influence of our society and culture upon the practice of our craft. I will say that, for me, the phrase that links these three realms is: “We cannot go it alone.” Each of these dimensions of our existence necessitates the humility to recognize that the only real power we have is in relationship. This I believe is true for each of us as therapist, as teacher, and as citizen. All three are embedded within impossible systems.