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The New York Society and Institute has always represented the ideal in psychoanalysis to me. When I was a candidate at Downstate, our most inspiring teachers, Jack Arlow and Mark Kanzer among others, brought indelible messages to us of dedication to scholarly inquiry, unflinching integrity, and humane understanding of every side of human beings, across the river from this august institution to our hard-to-reach young institute in a shabby section of Kings County Hospital. What they taught us about what is essential in psychoanalysis has remained as a strong foundation, I believe, for my theoretical understanding and clinical work. From such teachings I began to grasp Freud's revolutionary idea of psychic determinism, how to listen to meaningfully failed attempts at free associations, how to apprehend rises and falls in resistances, and how to understand and eventually interpret them as manifestations of intrapsychic defense, how first to sense and then to formulate the consolidations and shifts and fears and disguises of transference. Gradually, over decades actually, I became better able to use my responses and reflections to all this for the purpose of helping to bring to conscious life the buried ghosts of the past and then to allow patients to connect them, with emotional conviction, and with clear consequence, to their troubled present inner lives. Most critically, I began to acquire and deepen my identity as an analytic physician with all the rich meanings of this designation that Leo Stone memorably described—and embodies.
Much from those early days continues intact in my evolution as an analyst. But a good deal has changed as well, not in the basics, as I hope to show, but I think my patients and I have become able to