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While “psychoanalytic visionary” might seem oxymoronic for an authoritarian, largely cottage industry that historically has strongly encouraged conformity, punished deviance, and warded off external “nonanalytic” influences, Paul Mosher was a credentialed and certified maverick who rescued “classical” psychoanalytic thought from inaccessibility in spite of itself, and was only partly and lately recognized as the great contributor he was. He only recently received the Sigourney Award for his contributions to psychoanalysis, after twice being turned down, as belonging to the committee that launched his creation, PEP, or Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. His story raises the question: How does a multitalented young man define himself and contribute to a society that defines itself simply and rigidly?
I met Paul at the Educational Research Lab in 1970 at the New York State Psychiatric Institute where he was engaged in employing the new innovation of videotape in psychiatric education and research, and he most kindly helped me get started as a returning Vietnam combat psychiatrist. NYSPI's director, Lawrence C. Kolb, had compared videotape to frozen sections in pathology, that could be replayed to advance empirical science and learning. Nothing could have been further from purely auditory input to an unseen analyst. Paul was not only a fine physician, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, but also a technical polymath who (like me, we had lots in common) never saw a machine he didn't love. His visual perceptiveness extended to his photography (some lovely examples are provided).
After the establishment of that TV lab, Paul, whose aunt was the leading analyst Henrietta Klein, did not see his way to an academic psychoanalytic career at Columbia in New York. He moved to establish himself as a psychiatrist and analyst in Albany, his hometown, and to
focus on transforming the then-orthodox psychoanalytic tradition. In an autobiographical chapter in this Festschrift by numerou