Walter Bonime: 1904–2001

Spending time with Walter Bonime was a unique experience. His attentiveness and his genuine concern for the other made the moment special, enriching, and enhancing. Walter was generous of mind and spirit. He loved to teach. Either as a supervisor or as a seminar leader, he was always excited by the possibility of sharing his knowledge and experience with his students. He was the initiator and the soul of the Psychoanalytic Clinic at the Psychoanalytic Institute of New York Medical College, a clinic where he tirelessly taught and supported candidates and patients alike. For over 30 years he also led a clinical case seminar for Institute candidates on Thursday evenings out of his home in New York City. He proudly shared with his students the fact that he had been among the first group of psychoanalytic candidates that institute had trained. The Psychoanalytic Institute at New York Medical College was also the institute where he taught until three months prior to his death. Those of us blessed with having participated in those evening seminars will always cherish his openness and his hospitality. Week after week he welcomed us with his famous “peanuts and raisins” or his “health food snacks” and his insatiable interest in our work and our learning. His students shared in his ever-present quest for new knowledge and his honest questioning of established ways. He inspired us to be innovative in our thinking while honest in our questioning. His book, Clinical Use of Dreams, published in 1962, became a classic in the field. His second book, Collaborative Psychoanalysis, published in 1989 expanded with great clarity and depth his successful mode of practicing the profession he so much loved. He saw the therapeutic process as a constant process of collaboration where patient and therapist grew, matured, and developed within a noncompetitive therapeutic relationship. He was forever an optimist and worked hard at experiencing life as a challenge, an opportunity, and a journey