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We are in a car driving through the neighborhoods of Chicago. Sometimes we are taking in the sights - the tracks of the El we are driving under, the Lake that stretches out 300 miles - but other times we are filling each other in on our life stories. At some point Red said, “This is a mighty city”. I could feel the poetic force of her utterance: this was a city from which one could gather strength. Of course, with a name like O'Shaughnessy, red hair and a nickname to go with it, one might expect that “mighty” would have been pronounced with an Irish accent - much as one does hear at O'Shaughnessy's Public House in north Chicago. But no.
The car, the drive, the conversation created its own intimate space. Neither of us had an interest in analyzing our narratives further, but we were curious about the how of our friendship. We had a sense of each other's present-day qualities, but was there an historical dimension of which we were not aware? What was the from which of our lives? There were common themes. Both of our families had forced emigrations in previous generations, Jewish families escaping pogroms in eastern Europe (hers to South Africa, mine to Connecticut). There were absent or failed fathers and families falling apart. And then there was a second, personal emigration each with a double-magic: hers from South Africa to Oxford, mine from New England to Cambridge University. We each left a scene of misery and transported ourselves over geographical space. (The inner relief of such movement still needs to be better understood.) We each ended up at great British Universities where, in some sense, our adult lives began. We each were drawn to philosophy and then to psychoanalysis - cultures of inquiry with which one could fall in love and identify. We struck different balances but there was a common call to which we responded.