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When the editors of PSC invited us associate editors to interview a modern contributor to self psychology, I immediately knew I would choose Elizabeth Carr. Elizabeth’s generous appreciation of my first paper soon after I graduated from my analytic training encouraged me to continue writing, and our interaction about that paper transformed what had been a brief acquaintance into a genuine friendship that has grown over the years as we work together as associate editors of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. In reading Elizabeth’s papers and hearing her present over the years, I view her, at work and in her thinking, as emergent from Kohut’s foundational belief in empathic immersion with patients as the royal road to healing and growth. She has earned my admiration and respect for her deep knowledge of, commitment to, and expansion of self psychology’s theory and practice, as well for as her talent, spirit, energy, generosity and administrative ability.
Elizabeth’s story illuminates how a child’s innate gifts can be affirmed by a complex surround that catalyzes her growth and development. Betty, as she was called, grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina in a Catholic family. When she was nine years old, she, her two older brothers and her mother were all in the car when a drunk driver slammed into them. The horrific accident claimed the life of her father and seriously injured her mother and one of her brothers. She remembers riding in an ambulance with her gravely injured father and being the one in the family who possessed the composure to tell the emergency workers what had happened. Yet this catastrophic trauma didn’t derail her development—surely her mother’s and late father’s love, and her temperament, had given her the resilience to move through this tragedy and go on living and flourishing.
Extended family members took care of her and her brothers until her mother’s injuries healed, and her maternal grandmother and aunt moved from Connecticut to Charlotte to help her widowed