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“Man has no harbor, time has no shore./ It flows, and we pass on.” Lamartine (personal correspondence from Jacob Arlow to Poland; quoted in Poland discussion in Margulies 2014)
Pre-pandemic, embarking on a review of two extensive volumes of collected papers of an esteemed colleague, I wrote these notes, which I have edited for clarity:
Impression: reviewing his first book, the reader encounters Poland in his historical moment. Clinical theory is shifting and, inadequate to the task, theoretical language is under revision, evolving. Poland’s writing performs the psychoanalytic journey itself and captures his distinctive way of approaching another—an Other—creating a conversation that continually opens up with ceaseless, restless inquiry. Poland has a deep appreciation of what Loewald (1960, 1972) called “the something-more” of life, the becoming. An informed reader knows where things are heading, and so my interest is observing how Poland engages the issues of his moment, with all of the uncertainty and fog of change. And, years later in my now knowing how the field will evolve, I’m looking for what’s unique and enduring in Poland’s approach once one subtracts the shifts in theoretical fashion. What does endure, it seems to me, is Poland’s distinctive psychoanalytic way-of-being. I say way-of-being because his approach is so much more than theory, or experience, or knowledge: it is how he comports oneself, how one lives in a psychoanalytic way …
There is then Poland’s aspirational, psychoanalytic way-of-being (and just what is that?), but there is also, inextricably, the unique person of Warren Poland.
Precisely because “uniqueness of the other” is so much of what Poland’s work is about, to leave out his uniqueness would leave a flattened-out review. I hear Poland’s voice in his writing; his presence comes through, how he greets me—and others if you are standing nearby—with a big smile, a ready joke, drawing into conversation, quickly, almost effor