Epilogue

In a commentary some years ago on what university teaching does to the teacher, Jacques Barzun observed “teaching is extremely hard work; it is the original brain-drain, being the continual readjustment of one's thought to another's, not to placate or even to persuade, but to strengthen and enlarge, and make more complex” (1968, p. 55). Even as professors tend to lecture and grade, mathematicians iterate and reiterate, might we, like Disraeli upon hearing of the death of Talleyrand, fall into wondering what he really intended? One analyst used to remark that he was never sure whether he spent his time “healing wounds or wounding heels.” Another consoled a supervisee overwhelmed by the horror of a patient's narrative, “Look, misery keeps us in business.” Kurt Eissler when asked whether he would like to include an additional commentary to his article in this issue on the aging analyst, declined graciously, noting that “If I write any more, it's liable to discourage other analysts from growing older.” One thing is clear, seasoning in this work and the passage of time do not dim that “therapeutic twinkle.” In 1938, Freud himself, discovering on his return to Vienna that the Germans, in a raid on the city, had ransacked his office, simply shrugged his shoulders and remarked, “I would never have taken so much for a single visit” (Méras, 1983). Paradox and the inevitable come to be accepted with a characteristic serenity.

Observing various analytic minds at work is reminiscent of brain researcher Sir Charles Sherrington's word picture of the brain: “It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the brain becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one: a shifting harmony of subpatterns” (Restak, 1984, p. 305). In the preceding essays we have witnessed further signs of the evolution of a new perspective in psychoanalytic work. As is the nature of ev