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Lucy Bergson LaFarge, MD, was insistently herself. Coming from the time and place whence she sprang, that self-possession was hard-won. It was obvious from an early age that she was incredibly smart, yet that recognition was not exactly unproblematic. Nevertheless, she owned it. She read prodigiously. She inhaled literature. She brought her keen acumen to whatever came into her ken. All of us are the beneficiaries.
LaFarge grew up mostly in Cambridge, Massachusetts, attending Radcliffe College of Harvard University where her father was a distinguished economics professor. She attended the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and became chief resident of psychiatry there in 1978. She completed her psychoanalytic training at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in 1988, where she went on to become a training and supervising analyst and served for 30 years as a highly regarded classroom teacher and sought-after analyst and supervisor. She attained the rank of Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in 2009. She also taught and supervised at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for the last 10 years of her life.
At Columbia, Dr LaFarge was the recipient of the Beller Award (for a distinguished paper by a psychoanalytic candidate or recent graduate), the Klar Award (a teaching award bestowed by psychoanalytic candidates), the Daniels Award (the highest honour of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine), the Goldman Award (the highest honour of the Center), and the Rado Lectureship (named after the institute’s founding director). No other person in the 80-year history of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center and the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine has collected all those honours. Columbia basically kept lavishing her with awards until it ran out of them.
There are several reasons for this unprecedented achievement, the most obvious of which was LaFarge’s sheer brilliance and