Tribute to Henri Parens, M.D.

First of all, I thank all of you, the entire family for giving me the honor to be here and to be able to speak. I will say two comments as preface. One serious, and one light. As preface, I want to say that an old supervisor of mine, by the name of Daniel Josephthal, psychoanalyst of rare skill and rare menschood, once said to me, that he could understand his mother and father, only when they died. When his mother and father died, this supervisor, psychoanalyst of mine said, “that was the time I had complete and full empathy for the person”. Which I think is a remarkable statement to make, and I think it has many possible interpretations, as to what does this mean to have a complete and fuller understanding and empathy of a person, towards and of a person, understanding, when the person has passed away. That's a very interesting idea and I don't want to get into my speculations of what I think this idea means, but I wanted to share this idea with you. The second thought is a little lighter. The vast amount of obituaries of psychoanalysts that I have read, and vast majority of funerals of psychoanalysts that I have attended, mention the person—one quality that they always emphasize is that the person was very humble. In my experience, many such analysts were not humble at all, nor pretty much am I. Frankly, if any of you is going to call me humble when I'm dead at my funeral, I will rise up and object. So, do you see? I think it's a good idea to be lovingly candid and lovingly honest. I wrote the obituary of Dr. Selma Kramer who was our mutual colleague, Henri's and mine, and in that I wrote that she did not know how to cook, and was a very bad driver. Now that was taken out by The International Journal of Psychoanalysis—they say it's not a good thing to say such things about a person who has passed away. I thought I was just being descriptive! So, with that, all that as a preface, I say, basically, four things about Henri. First, I thought that I'll begin by saying