Remembering Jeremy Safran, Ph.D.

I met Jeremy Safran during the spring semester my first year of graduate school, when I took an elective course he was teaching on Melanie Klein. I hardly knew anything about psychoanalysis, and it wasn’t the best choice for a beginner. I didn’t really know how to engage with the texts at first and felt as if I was starting in the middle of something treacherous—impossible even—for me to comprehend. But Jeremy wasn’t worried about this. He would say to our class, with a laugh, “Sometimes I’m not even sure what Klein means by this! Let’s all read through it together and see if we can understand.” And we did. He helped us to put the theory in context, to break down abstract concepts. He treated our ideas in class discussion and in our weekly response papers seriously, as worthy of consideration and thoughtful feedback. Jeremy imparted his love of and excitement about theory through his teaching, and in so doing made psychoanalytic thinking accessible to us.

At The New School, Jeremy Safran taught a number of courses on psychoanalytic theory and technique, and he was a research mentor and clinical supervisor. As such, he played a very big role in very many lives and graduate careers. I am personally indebted to Jeremy for his encouragement of my interest in psychoanalysis; he connected me with the editors of this very journal, where I worked as an intern during graduate school and was eventually made an editor. Everyone who knew him knew that Jeremy simply loved his work. He didn’t write or speak in esoterica; he didn’t look to keep people out. He invited us all in as students and trainees, inviting us to think, to be curious about our co-constructed realities, and to be nonjudgmental. He would often share his own clinical experiences with such honesty, telling us about times when he noticed himself getting bored, sleepy, or frustrated in session with his own patients. He spoke about encountering his own doubts. He was so generous in this way; he didn’t look down from o