Corresponding With Arlow

Discussions of Jacob Arlow's broad additions to psychoanalysis, its practice and its theory, to psychoanalytic literature and education, to psychoanalytic organization and administration, all reflect the public side of his contributions. Yet Jack enriched profoundly the life of many through the warmth of his emotional immediacy and his personal generosity. It is fitting to remember him in part through some of his own words.

Throughout his being, Jack was a man of the enlightenment and carried forward the values of the enlightenment through modernity and postmodernism. His sensibility combined the serious thinking of a true intellectual with an aesthetic openness that was receptive to form in its multiple resonances. His mind was a place where passion and precision were one; its organizing principle was that of the enlightenment.

Freud, reflecting on his hero Goethe's last words, “More light,” said that the model for his own work was ever “More darkness.” Jack's approach to life captured both, always working to carry more light ever deeper into areas of darkness. A few personal details may show how strongly this was true.

Jack's earliest childhood memory was of his father's reaching upward to turn on the gaslight. Later, when asked to describe the models most important to him, he wrote:

I have a very clear memory going back to the age of twelve and a half. We were studying Isaiah and came to those lines that resonate so beautifully and so powerfully in the original Hebrew:

• The people who walked in darkness saw a great light.

• Those who dwelt in the deepest shadow, a light appeared unto them.

I felt a surge of aesthetic pleasure and awe, but I felt immediately that I could not share these sentiments with any of my friends.1

A sculptor, Jack created a marble carving of Prometheus bound, one of his finest pieces. He anguished that he could never fully succeed in capturing in stone Prometheus's actual acquisition of light, but he had no doubt about the vital force within Prom