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I have had a long and difficult intellectual, emotional, and interpersonal struggle in becoming a psychoanalyst. For the first fourteen years of my analytic career, I did not have an exemplar in psychoanalysis with whom to identity until I discovered Sándor Ferenczi in 1978, fourteen years after I began training at what was then Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, in New City.
My academic and personal experiences prior to analytic training had made a significant positive contribution to my identity. As I look back over my preanalytic experience, there were teachers, supervisors, and colleagues that provided me with the necessary affirmation to pursue the study of psychology and psychotherapy. At University of Buffalo, as an undergraduate, Olive Lester, the Chairperson of the Psychology Department, directly expressed her feelings to me that I had the ability to become a psychologist and should pursue graduate studies. Walter Gruen and Aron Hershkovitz had faith in my capacity to become a clinician. Marvin Farber, a student of the philosopher Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, taught me to appreciate logic and the scientific method and the importance of phenomenology.
I was also influenced by my training in humanistic psychology at The Counseling and Psychotherapy Research Center at The University of Chicago, founded by Carl Rogers. At The Counseling Center, Robert Butler, Rosalyn Cartwright, Eugene Gendlin, Laura Rice, John Shlien, and Fred Zimring showed me respect by treating me as a young colleague, not an ignorant beginner. Teaching at The Counseling Center emphasized intellectual liberalism, American empiricism, empathy, flexibility, and responsiveness in clinical functioning. These client-centered psychotherapists never acted like they possessed the truth. Intellectually, they taught me to search for a truth by developing hypotheses and collecting data. One was to use the phenomenological method of attuning to the actual immediate experience in the