Lucy Bergson LaFarge

I have never met anyone like Lucy LaFarge nor anyone who reminded me of her. Lucy was always irrepressibly herself and unplaceable to me, and these were some of the most appealing aspects of her.

I first met Lucy LaFarge in the early 1990s, when we were each invited to speak at a conference at Austen Riggs on working with the difficult-to-reach patient. A few years later, in 1995, we met again in, of all places, West Point Academy in upstate New York. It was on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Lucy was the first to speak and I felt an immediate sense of connexion to her when she stated: “I don’t like large groups of people I don’t know”. The comment, a mix of openness and suspicion, was so Lucy! She sought close, intimate conversation, probing to find those she could trust. When she felt trust in another person, her mirth, self-effacing humour, and generosity were on offer. This also came through in her very effective small working groups at IJP, the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and Austen Riggs.

We learned that we had each that year been made training and supervising analysts at our respective institutes. We were each speaking at this anniversary celebration, and as I recall we quickly moved into a quite intimate conversation about our talks. We were young relative to most of the highly accomplished presenters whose papers we were asked to discuss.

In that same extended conversation, we discovered that we had in common that our fathers had been highly accomplished university professors. My sense in retrospect is that we were speaking of an evoked experience of being children with the grown-ups at a party, each feeling a bit out of place. Perhaps some sort of mistake had been made regarding our being given a platform to speak? It was a fun, surprising conversation. By the end of that conversation, I concluded that I had never met anyone quite like Lucy.

We also discovered that we had been reading each other’s writing, and we wer