Luxembourg Gardens, 1947

The photographer who made this image, Ivan Massar, was my stepchildren’s father, a photojournalist with Black Star and an artist. The picture is from the late 1940s, Paris. I have known about this photo for about as long as I have known my wife, Barbara. I was always drawn to it. Loved it. My stepson, David, on the day his father died in his 90s, brought this to me as a gift. The image speaks for itself. The relational tone between the gentleman and the boy, the freedom of the boy to speak with a trusting ease, the attentive elder, touches me where my grandfather resides inside. I have written two psychoanalytic papers centered around my grandfather’s impact on my development as a person and as an analyst. The closest Grandpa came to the Luxembourg Gardens was as a doughboy in the trenches of Besançon. Grandpa,

if he had not left school in the sixth grade and run a newsstand in NYC, if he were a cultivated European gentleman, would look like this man. Now that I am older than the gentleman in the photograph, the atmosphere of Being With, the ease and freedom of the boy, the trust in being listened to and heard, strikes me as metaphorically conjuring an alive analytic space, perhaps depicting the reverie of a man on the couch touching his experience in a moment of boyhood. It goes without saying that I am the elderly gentleman, and the grandfather, and the analyst, and the man on the couch dreaming of a visit with his grandfather, and the boy who, back in the 1940s, enjoyed those moments with Grandpa. And now, the elderly gentleman, with the attentiveness of his listening, and perhaps the shape of his glasses and the smoking, conjures an image of Freud. And a reminder of the English translation of Freude: Joy.

Stuart A. Pizer, PhD, ABPP, is a Founding Board Member, Faculty, Supervising and Personal Analyst, and Pas