Memoir

February 26, 2007

1931 is a long time ago, but it doesn't seem so to me. That was the year I entered medical school.1 All my life I had wanted to be a doctor, and here I was, ready to begin. At Harvard College, I had majored in chemistry. Chemistry fascinated me. We lived very close to the college and I can remember walking along Cambridge Street on my way to class, thinking about van der Waals's equations and what they had to say about the composition of matter. I also took the biology and physics that were required for admission to medical school, but much as I liked the sciences, I had no desire to be a chemist. What I wanted was to be a doctor.

Not only so. By the time I entered medical school, I had decided that I wanted to become a psychoanalyst. That seems like an unexpected ambition for a young fellow who was so fascinated by chemistry, doesn't it? I had taken courses other than the ones in science. A course in Latin, for one, where we read Plautus and Terence and Horace. Horace was mostly rather dull, but the plays of Plautus and Terence were great for a college freshman, with their talk of sex and prostitutes. I had also taken a number of courses in German literature. Remember, that was 1930, when Germany was recognized as the world center for medicine and for science in general. But in all my years at college I never took a course in psychology. For good reason: I had no interest in the subject. In fact, at the time I decided to become a psychoanalyst I had only the haziest idea of what psychoanalysis was all about and what doctors who were psychoanalysts did. I had no intention of becoming a psychoanalyst in June of 1931, yet by September I had decided that's what interested me most and that was what I was going to be.

At the time I had no idea how or why that had happened. It seemed perfectly natural. It didn't even occur to me to question why I was so