Notes on Teaching the Standard Edition

Donald Kaplan was my psychoanalytic mentor and one of my first teachers at the New York University Postdoctoral Program for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. I was both surprised and thrilled by the way he taught Sigmund Freud's work—a delightful mix of erudition and humor. Donald proudly identified as a Freudian analyst, but he didn't swallow Freud's theoretical positions whole. He knew Freud sometimes “got it wrong,” especially in his explanations of female development and pathology. One standout example was Freud's assertion that non-neurotic women must have vaginal, not clitoral, orgasms.

I'll never forget when Donald recounted his first training case with a highly sexual female patient. His classical supervisor insisted that Donald ask what kind of orgasms the woman was having. Finally mustering the courage, he interrupted a particularly graphic description of her previous evening's escapade. “You know, you've never told me what kind of orgasms you have,” he said meekly. She turned to him with a broad grin. “Oh, I have great orgasms!” So much for that theory.

I've always been drawn to Freud's writings, and, to this day, I don't understand psychoanalysts who dismiss or criticize his ideas so easily. Being in Donald's class solidified my appreciation for Freud, and that appreciation has never wavered. The depth and breadth of one man's revolutionary insights continue to amaze me—from his expansion of the theory of the unconscious to his discoveries around childhood sexuality and the universality of perversion. His demonstration that dreams are meaningful wish-fulfillments protecting sleep, his understanding of conflict, defense, and repetition compulsion, and his view of psychopathology as a continuum are equally profound. His brilliant take on melancholia as the price one pays for preserving a relationship by internalizing aggression, along with his belief that civilization exists to repress human sexual and aggressive drives, remain endlessly fascinating.

I proud