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At the High Holiday service last fall, the new Jewish Reform prayer book, Mishkan HaNefesh, changed a central ancient prayer. Instead of the original plea, “Inscribe me in the Book of Life,” it now reads, “Inscribe me in the Book of Life Well-Lived.” On first hearing this I wondered, “How does one begin to identify and evaluate a well-lived life?” I thought again of this question as I read Paul Ornstein’s lovely and surprisingly profound memoir titled simply Looking Back: Memoir of a Psychoanalyst. If you want to know what a life well lived looks like, read this book.
Still the book raises many questions for me. What are the ingredients of a well-lived life? From our own lives, from our history as psychoanalysts, from analytic theory, and from child and family literature, we have gleaned ideas about the foundational experiences that inform positive human functioning. Selfobject experience, affective attunement, mentalizing experience, and positive parental vision—we are persuaded that these foster in children conditions for psychological growth and development and a solid sense of self. Yet, how do these ingredients combine with experience, and what are the quickening agents that propel a person toward a well-lived life? That is, what is the mysterious alchemy that transforms these ingredients into a realized life? Finally, how as analysts do we foster such a process in the adult lives of our patients? Although we have some directions here, this terrain is still somewhat murky. Using Paul Ornstein’s story, this review will inquire into these questions.
Ornstein’s long life—91 years and counting—spans what seems like several centuries. His story begins chronologically with his birth in the small Hungarian village of Hajdunanas, a day’s travel from the capital city of Budapest. He grew up there in a traditional world of central European, Jewishly observant culture, a world bounded by Jewish ritual and practice but—by the mid-1920s—with some bows to Western secular in