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I first met Arnold in the mid-1980 s when I attended his week-long Self-Psychology Seminar on Cape Cod. It was a week to remember! Marcia Dobson and I found a B&B in Wellfleet at an old house sitting on a bluff overlooking the ocean and run by one of the strangest couples we have ever met. They invited us to a dinner lit by myriads of candles in a darkened dining room, making it feel more like a spooky séance than a meal. The winds were howling around the gabled house and the waves were crashing on the cliffs below. A perfect backdrop for the seminars we were attending! While I was going to Arnie’s workshop and learning about self psychology, Marcia was attending a seminar by Otto Kernberg in which she learned about … Otto Kernberg. Every afternoon we enjoyed the divine Cape Cod beaches and each night we would compare notes on our seminars.
I was clearly having the better experience! It was in this workshop where I got to see Arnie’s extraordinary pedagogical abilities, as he brilliantly laid out the basic concepts of self psychology. While it was not fully clear to me at the time, this workshop was so stimulating that it shifted the entire direction of my professional research and writing. It opened such exciting vistas that I am still exploring them, even after writing three books and myriads of conference presentations and articles on how self psychology can ground ethical life and why its vision of the self is so revolutionary for the culture. It was in Arnie’s workshop where I first found the set of ideas that I could love, develop, explore, and share with the world.
Almost two decades passed before Arnie’s next monumental effect on my life. Jonathan Lear and the Committee on Social Thought invited me to be the Kohut Professor at the University of Chicago for the fall term of 2003. The professorship had been established by one of Arnie’s patients who was so grateful about her analysis with him that she, in consultation with him, funde