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Robert Stolorow (1994) Suggests that, “At the Deepest Level of our theoretical constructions we are operating within a sphere of subjectivity” (p. 20). As I have moved into midlife, I have become more aware of and curious about the subjective origins of my own theoretical commitments. If midlife is a time of reflection and integration, as many life cycle theorists suggest, then my own middle years have followed the expected trajectory of increased introspection and a gradual putting-together, at a new level, of what has gone before in my life. One outcome of this continuing process is an increased awareness that what just “fell: right” theoretically in my early years as a clinician was in fact predetermined in convoluted and surprising ways.
Looking back now, it is clear to me that my own association with psychoanalytic theory began twenty years before I was born. Lest the reader surmise that I dabble in the supernatural, this mysterious statement bears explanation. When my mother was 23 years old, she delivered a baby girl, her first child, in the bedroom of my parents' little cottage in a central Indiana farm town, with the help of a midwife and a country doctor. My father, 25, sat in the kitchen waiting to be called in to see the