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First of all, I want to express my gratitude to my psychoanalytic friends and colleagues at Columbia University for organizing this excellent program in my honor and to the panelists who produced such fine papers for the occasion. They surely enriched the understanding and appreciation of everyone, including me, as to what I have been up to all these years.
Next, I want to unfold a brief narrative of my travels in the world of psychoanalysis. I have told the “same story” in other ways; some were mentioned by the panelists.
The story begins in 1942 on an upstate country road. The assistant director of Camp Ramapo is walking along with a camp counselor who is a senior at City College of New York, a fervent left-winger, majoring in psychology. Asked about his long-range aspirations, the counselor says he wants to master Freud, Rorschach, and Marx.
In the course of events, the young psychologist dropped Marx from his program, though not his own leftish leanings, and with all due respect he also downsized Rorschach in the scale of things.
Well, Freud turned out to be not an entity of fixed size that one can climb and reach the top of; Freud kept changing, being several Freuds at once, driving one back to the beginning again and again, very hard to pin down and teach. In short, he was an endless project that combined confusion, excitement, fulfillment, new problems, and renewed curiosity.
In this way, Freud proved to be a journey and continues to be a journey; it is a journey being taken by many others as well as oneself, and one is always in dialogue with them, knowingly or not. The others include other analysts, psychologists, and social workers, philosophers, historians, literary theorists, developmental psychologists, neuropsychologists, and still other students of human beings. From all of them, this