“Being Myself as the Analyst I Have Become:” An Interview with Jay B. Frankel

In 2015, during the IPA Congress in Boston, Jay Frankel, Gabriele Cassullo, and I started editing a book about Sandor Ferenczi (Dimitrijević, Cassullo, and Frankel, 2018). In the following couple of years, we met regularly online, for the most part once a week, and gathered in Berlin, where Jay gave a lecture at the International Psychoanalytic University, in Florence, in Paris, where we interviewed Judith Dupont (Dimitrijević, in press), in New Jersey, and in Washington D.C., where all three of us presented at a conference about the “Lines of Development” book series.

This collaboration - successful despite many challenges - led to a personal friendship and new joint projects (see Frankel, 2020, 2022). I had the privilege of talking to Jay about his interpretations, impressions, and plans, and about his reminiscences and contacts. I felt he had lived at the epicenter of contemporary American psychoanalysis, but I also felt that my image was only fragmentary.

When my interview with Professor Michael B. Buchholz was published in the International Forum of Psychoanalysis (Dimitrijevic, 2021), a detailed conversation about Jay’s contributions, development, and experiences seemed like a most natural continuation. Recordings of our four meetings, held over April and May of 2020, were kindly transcribed by Ms. Gamze Farz, MA, edited by myself, and corrected and approved by Jay Frankel.

This text is a slightly condensed version of the transcript, kindly accepted by Dr. Marco Conci and Dr. Grigoris Maniadakis, the Coeditors-in-Chief of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis, without significant cuts, as this Bildungsroman deserves.