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Jill Gardner (JG):
There are a couple ideas I thought we could start with, Estelle. I was trying to think about how long I’ve known you and I remember the first time I heard you speak, which made a big impression on me. It was at our conference in San Francisco, in 1989. I went to a session you offered in which you talked about three recently published books: one by Michael Basch, one by Arnold Goldberg, and one by Bob Stolorow.
Estelle Shane (ES):
I remember. That encompassed the question, Is it one self psychology or many. And my point was that there are many, because each of these visions of self psychology are different from one another in important ways. And I think that’s something to be glad for, proud of, and to not regret, because change and evolution are valuable and in fact inevitable.
JG:
Yes, that’s certainly true in terms of your earliest training and even in terms of your life in self psychology. Your ideas have evolved a great deal, which is one of the things we’ll talk about. But the reason I wanted to start with this talk was not only to see how long we’ve known each other. That session stayed with me because I was so struck with how you were able to extract the essence of what each of these people was saying in their books and then compare and contrast them in a way that felt like a whole education in an hour. By the end I felt like I had read the three books. That kind of integration, comparison, and clarity of thought, so evident to me in my first encounter with you 33 years ago, is very typical of your work and one of its strengths.