Remembering Marian Tolpin

Iam honored to write about Marian Tolpin, who died on Tuesday, June 10 after some weeks at home in hospice care. She was so much a part of us for so many years it is hard to think that she is no longer with us. I counted Marian as a friend and colleague for over 40 years.

By any measure, she was a distinguished psychoanalyst. She was an esteemed clinician, a dynamic teacher, an important writer, and a much-loved colleague, both to us here in Chicago and to many others in our country—and beyond the seas. She wrote a dozen and a half articles, edited the book on Kohut's lectures with Paul, wrote many discussions and book reviews, and appeared in countless panels and discussions in numberless professional and scientific meetings. She and Paul were among the original members of the circle around Heinz Kohut as he was developing the ideas that later became self psychology. They contributed to the casebook that illustrated those ideas, and she was a tireless explicator and applicator of self psychology, as well as being one of its most distinguished proponents.

She was not larger than life; she was life. She infused her encounters with her energy and her eager sharing of her own feelings, reactions, and ideas. She was like that almost to the moment she died. As had many of you, I had the privilege of visiting with Marian in her last weeks intending to stay perhaps for a few minutes and finding myself in animated exchange about everything important for well over an hour. That everything included her life, her death, what was happening in psychoanalysis, the development of her grandchildren of whom she was so proud, and the affairs of the world.

I left feeling both uplifted and unbearably sad. Tears came unbidden, as they often have, as I realized that she would soon leave us.

What a paradox! Here was a woman who had lived 82 full and active years, and we all feel an aching loss—as if she were taken from us prematurely. Marian, herself, was perhaps more serene