Marian Tolpin as a Psychoanalytic Writer

Iwould like to share a few observations about my experience with Marian Tolpin as a psychoanalytic writer. By 2004, Marian was getting more serious about writing a casebook to further define the theory of the forward edge and illustrate its clinical applications. Marian had been part of a group that produced a casebook based on Kohut's emerging ideas in the mid 1970s. She believed this format could similarly present an important contemporary extension of self psychology—the forward edge, the transference of health, and the total transference (in her thinking, both forward and trailing edges of the transference and the intermediate areas). She wanted interested collaborators for her project, and asked Paula Fuqua and me to work with her on this new casebook. Although the casebook itself did not progress past the beginning stages, conversations abut the project did provide opportunities to discuss Marian's ideas about psychoanalytic writing.

This brings me to my first observation: Marian organized “top-down” for publication—that is, she drew on her impressive knowledge of psychoanalytic theory to ground her writing conceptually. However, she developed her ideas “bottom-up”—inductively. With impressive energy and gusto, she worked, reworked, and refined her thinking through immersion not in but with “the data”—case material—which she found endlessly fascinating

and exciting. Marian had exceptional capacity not only to be open to the uniqueness of each clinical moment—as if she were experiencing it for the very first time—but also to understand that moment in depth and theoretical context. She possessed useable clinical wisdom, theoretical sophistication, and capacity to integrate enthusiasm with innovative insights. This, I believe, kept her writing lively and creative.

This brings me to my next observation: Marian liked “writing assignments”—a