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After Anton Ehrenzweig died in 1967 I was asked to speak at a memorial meeting for him at the Institute of Contemporary Art.1 This is what I said.
I have gained so much from my experience of Anton as a friend, so I decided that the best way I can contribute to this meeting is to tell something of the personal context in which I came to view his work. For, in my experience, he was such a personal person; he had such a gift for making vivid contacts with people, such a capacity for grasping in a flash what one was trying to say (even though one had by no means yet said it) — such a capacity for breaking through English reserve and going straight to a point, not only with a cogent intellectual comment, but also with humour, or with gentle teasing. Of course, he could easily get angry: his aggression was by no means deeply hidden and there was plenty of it, so he often got himself involved in quarrels. (Once, on the phone, he told me that some friend of his would no longer speak to him. When I asked what he, Anton, had done, he answered, a little ruefully, ‘Oh, only told him to go to hell.’)
My personal contact with him began when we were introduced by his old friend and schoolmate, Dr Rubenstein, at the 1953 International Psycho-Analytical Conress in London, but I only came really to know him, in 1955, at the next Congress in Geneva. It was here that I realized his sensitiveness to what someone else was trying to say, for he came to hear my 1955 Congress paper, ‘The Yell of Joy’ (see Chapter 10).2