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I want to share that portion of my life that was Abram Kardiner. It was a portion that was amused by his wry humor, pleasured by his hospitality, enriched by his wide-ranging knowledge, stimulated by his creative brilliance and is now deprived by his loss. Those psychoanalysts and allied professionals who knew him, and those who did not, will be forever influenced by his work, whether or not this influence is consciously recognized.
The memory of my first meeting with him is still vivid. He had agreed to see me with the idea of taking me on as an analysand and I had my first session with him on a sunny September afternoon in 1936. He was seated in the classical position — in an armchair behind a couch. There was about him an aura of both quietude and intensity and I thought he looked like Lincoln. I still do. He had a stage actor's voice, low-pitched and resonant. He was then 45 years old but he looked neither young nor middleaged. He had a quality of agelessness that changed surprisingly little over the many years I knew him.
He was only 14 years away from his own analysis with Freud, who was still alive, yet Kardiner had already discarded metapsychological concepts. This took great courage, independence of spirit and confidence in his own ideas. I heard no orthodoxy in my analysis, which was conducted in clear English, free of ambiguities and pretentious jargon. During the three years I was with him, he was writing his classic, The Individual and Society, a work that derived from his collaboration with the anthropologist, Ralph Linton.